


the gamekeeper’s hut

by lemonbalmlemonverbena



Series: Nine gifts from the Old Gods [5]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Past Abuse, Past Sexual Abuse, Ramsay is his own warning, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-14
Updated: 2018-01-28
Packaged: 2019-03-04 13:29:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 35,433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13365705
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lemonbalmlemonverbena/pseuds/lemonbalmlemonverbena
Summary: Multi-part smutfic. Set after 7x07 as far as series canon goes. This is the same universe as the kids but goes all the way back to the middle of the SanSan love story.





	1. First Night

They’d run away from Winterfell. They needed to fuck and talk, but mostly fuck, so desperately, and there were _so_ many people in Winterfell. Brienne was always there, politely eyeing him as though he were dangerous, not to mention the question of what to say to Jon, and she couldn’t explain herself to _him_ without having first been with Sandor Clegane, because if she hadn’t been with him yet, what would she say?

 _I’m obsessed with the idea of a man I haven’t seen in years. I’ve been dreaming of him for years, and it got clearer and more intense the further North I came, and since I’ve been back in Winterfell, I love him every night in my dreams and I wake up with my smallclothes soaked through and sometimes my lips feel torn up where I bite them_ in my sleep _to keep from screaming with pleasure._

Truly, since he'd reappeared like it was nothing, she felt as though she were going to vibrate out of her own skin.

She knew, in her heart, that he had the dreams too. They were part him, part her. She knew that when she saw her bare back curved below him and then someone grabbed her by the hair and yanked her up, exposing her neck and cutting her throat with a silvery blade, that was him.

When she saw herself pregnant and smiling, serene on the battlements, and then watched her own surprise and shock at the knife in her belly, she knew that was him too, and she grieved for what he’d felt on whatever night some stranger had told him the truth of the Red Wedding.

She knew that was him, and she could almost hear him whisper “be careful, girl." She was never frightened at those scenes, but sad for him and sad for herself, and a little nostalgic for a time when she had the luxury of being frightened by only the Hound.

He had vanished the night of the Blackwater, and that was that. And then Arya came home and told her about their time together. She said the Hound was dead--the Hound himself had told her so—but Sansa never felt that could be right.

He came to her and she to him, every night, and she felt he was as real and as alive as she. So she was either a lunatic--but _specifically in her dreams_ \--or he was still out there. Somewhere.

She hoped, though, every day, that he would come to her, and he never ever did. Until suddenly Jon was home, and with him came the bloody Hound, Sandor Clegane, like that made sense.

At first he was so cold to her that she wanted to weep, and when she saw his easy familiarity with Arya—they ate from the same plate and went _everywhere_ together from the first minute after they were reunited—she was so consumed with envy that she felt ill.

 _“Sword through the eye and out the back of my skull, was that it? Same as before: I’ll give you one shot. Do it if you can, but if you miss, I’ll break both your hands...Wait, are you_ crying _? Oh for fuck’s sake.”_

He’d hardly wavered when she’d given him Heartsbane, _for fuck’s sake_.

Samwell Tarly sat on a bench and unwrapped it and babbled about the history of his family and then said, “The only question is who’s going to wield it, because it probably won’t be me,” and then Jon had just stood there like that was really a question, and she’d scraped back her chair because _the question obviously only had one answer_.

She stood up and without sparing a glance for Tarly snatched the sword out of his hands and walked down the center of the great hall with all those eyes on her. The room was as silent as the crypts, and she only had eyes for the one in the back, leaning against the wall in the shadows, with Arya, of course.

She stopped in front of him, and he stepped out into the light, and she handed it to him, and his eyes softened for _barely_ a moment and in her mind she heard, “Aye, girl, I’ll fight for you,” and then that was it.

His face went hard again, and she turned back toward the high table, and some wag shouted, “Lass, you’ve got to kiss it for luck!” and she looked back then, as if to suggest she would indeed “kiss the sword” given half a chance, but he just slung Heartsbane over his shoulder and looked away and fell back into the shadows.

She’d only known she had a chance when he rode off on Stranger.

She’d saved Stranger without knowing what she was doing. He had come in with what seemed like a thousand other horses after the Battle of the Bastards, and the stablemaster had selected him as one of the ones for her to either sell or put down.

“This one’s old and mean; no good.”

But that night she saw him in her dreams, and she saved him because she knew that horse meant something, and every other week the stablemaster complained that the big black had bitten another stableboy and that he was so cantankerous that they had to just let him out to run instead of exercising him properly.

He cost a fortune to feed, and she’d had to pay for three different mares that he’d settled.

Her stable man muttered horrible things about the both of them disgracing House Stark.

Then one day Arya came in to her solar and practically screeched, “ _Whyyyyy_ do we have _the Hound’s horse_?!” She let Arya reintroduce the two of them. She felt like a coward for not daring to speak to him about the horse or anything else, but she just didn’t know where to begin.

It was when he had to go out with the rest of them to fight and possibly die, that he _finally_ looked at her. Really looked, and he took a deep shuddering breath as they eyed each other from across the yard, and then he rode away.

When he returned, she caught up to him at last, walking aimlessly in the godswood, of all places. Brienne was with her. She asked for a minute, and blessed Brienne stepped away and turned her back to them--albeit reluctantly.

She put her hands on his sleeves and looked up at him. Had he always been so tall? She whispered to him: “Arya says you’re always in the stables. Do you think you could get a couple of horses?”

And he gave her a  _“What are you doing, girl?”_ look, but then leaned in to whisper back, right over her ear, “Probably.”

“Can you find the Hunter’s Gate?”

“Maybe.”

“Then meet me there at midnight.”

He pulled back then so he could look into her eyes with an angry warning in his.

“Stark.”

And she could have wept at him calling her that, because that wasn’t her name by him and anyway Stark was her father, her grandfather, and his father before him. Not her.

“I know what it is, and so do you, I think. I’ll be there, and I’ll wait, but if you can’t come—if you _won’t_ come, I’d understand. I do. I understand," she said.

And then she left him alone in the snow with the trees.

But that night he was there. He was there. He was _early_ , and so was she, and they laughed quietly at that, and he wanted to know how far they were going and she told him not too far but she’d brought food in case they got snowed in. He shook his head at her and took the sack of food off her shoulder and put it in one of his saddlebags, and held her horse still for her while she mounted.

Must and Fossa, the guards, looked slowly back and forth at the two of them when she told them to open the gate, but she offered her best, most pleasing good-girl smile, and they opened the gate.

She’d left a note for Brienne and Jon and Arya that they would be back, but as they rode out that night she thought to herself that she truly didn’t care if she never came back ever so long as she was with him, wherever.

She took him to a gamekeeper’s hut on the far western edge of the Stark lands. The snows were already so high that while he put away the horses, she had to dig out the door with her hands.

She was lighting the fire when he came in. She knew nothing about him. Nothing. But she knew he didn’t like fire.

She was past caring about propriety. He came in and stamped the snow off his boots, and she just went up to him and untied the ties at the neck of that filthy mustard-color cloak he wore, as if touching him and undressing him was a normal thing she did every day of her life. She hung it up on a hook behind the door, and then removed hers too. He slung off Heartsbane and leaned it at the foot of the bed, and unbuckled his belt with the longsword and the daggers and put that down, too.

Taking off their cloaks had been a bad idea. _Bad idea._ Shivers. Chattering teeth. So cold. The fire was still too meek to drive out the chill.

And then she went to the wooden chest at the foot of the bed and found the linens and started making the bed, because that was what they were there for and she didn’t want to wait or talk first or give him a chance to run from her.

By any normal standard, she was _out of her mind_. She hadn’t seen this...this _killer_ since she was a _child_. They had no relationship; proper, improper, moral, immoral--nothing, none.

They weren’t married, weren’t promised, weren’t friends, weren’t anything.

He was notorious. Her disgrace, if that’s what it came to, would shame Jon, and the Stark name, and the North at large.

This was, by every standard and measure she considered, astonishingly ill-advised, foolhardy, pathetic and dangerous.

She was depending on the truth of her...dreams?

Then he looked her, with that same shuddering sigh from when he left on Stranger and all the emotion of all their years apart on his face, and said “Fuck it,” and came over and helped her tuck the sheet over the feather mattress and lay out a bedspread and cover that with every fur they could find.

She stood on one side of the bed and unlaced her dress and pulled it off. She pulled the straps of her shift over her shoulders and let it slip down off her body. She rolled down her stockings. She folded them all neatly and hung them both over the back of one of the chairs at the little kitchen table. Shivering, she climbed under the covers, naked but for her smallclothes, and watched as he loomed over her on the other side of the bed. He pulled off his boots and unclasped his jacket and shrugged it off, and stripped off his mail and his tunic. He dropped them all in an unceremonious pile next to the bed, and then untied his breeches and pushed them down past his knees and kicked them off. And then he climbed into bed.

She could see that he was already as hard as she was wet.

Her heart hurt to look at him. He looked so different and so good—healthier, stronger—and she had missed him so much, in the same impossible way she missed the dead. _Not coming back. Not now, not ever, no matter how much you beg the gods._ And yet, here he was.

Their first real kiss was naked in bed together.

Was that unusual or was that how it had been for any person who had ever been married to a stranger?

So he kissed her, and she kissed him, and _yes_ , this is was them. _Yes. Yes._

She wasn’t going insane after all, and this wasn’t the first time they’d been together but the thousandth.

She felt so grateful. So grateful to him and to the gods or whatever power had brought them together. She felt sure she’d be long dead if she hadn’t carried him around in her heart all those years.

The real thing was _so_ warm. His beard scratched her face and her neck and the throbbing between her legs was so consuming. She felt her lips swell with blood and she squirmed at the feeling and brushed her thighs against each other. When she kissed him and sucked on his tongue and gnawed on his lower lip, she felt ravenous. She wanted to _eat him_ as much as anything. Just devour him bodily and bring him back inside her where he belonged.

And then he pushed her away from him and ran his whole hand down her neck, over the valley between her breasts, along the shallow of her belly, down to the place where her legs met her body. She was still wearing smallclothes. He hooked them down with one finger and she lifted her hips and pulled them down her legs with one hand, and then rubbed her legs together to wiggle them down past her knees so she could kick them off. The friction of rubbing her legs together sparked a soaking wetness and a sound that could only be called a whimper.

He brushed over her hair down there with his hand, so gently, and her legs fell open.

When she looks back on it now, she thinks they both look so frightened. 

_dontfuckthisupiloveyouletmeloveyoudoyoulovemeyouarethebeginningandtheendofmedontyouknowhowifeelwhatifidoitwrong_

He asked her, “What do you want, bird? Tell me what you want,” with the most desperate, searching look in his eyes, and she hardly knew what to say since no one had ever asked her that before. She saw his huge manhood, so hard and thick and long, between them. It was jumping with need, pointing right toward her, and all she could think to say was the truth: “I want it all.”

So he pulled himself over her and looked at her again and his cock was right there at her entrance and then she got a little angry because, really, how much did she have to beg him? She would, she _would_ beg for it if she had to. She knew he wasn’t tormenting her for sport but she was so shamelessly close to groveling just the same.

The truth was that he expected her to change her mind and leave. To have second thoughts. To flee. To set him on fire and leave him there burning.

She waited for him, then, like she had waited for such a long time.

Waited and watched him and touched his cheekbone below his good eye, and gingerly, skittishly touched the stone in his throat that was what made men’s voices like his so deep and gravelly. She used both hands to try to soothe the tension and the fear out of his shoulders and the back of his upper arms.

And with the look of a man in torment, he plunged inside her all at once, and gods it hurt and it also felt like the only happiness she had ever known.

There it was. Together finally. _Finally._ This was what her body had been waiting for all these years.  

Later, all she remembered about that first time, honestly, was the feel of him inside her. When he was done, she wouldn’t let him pull out. He muttered something about, “I’m heavy, girl,” and she didn’t know how to explain herself—the feeling that if he left her, she would die—so since she didn’t have any words, when he tried to lift himself off her, she just clutched him back and whined in mute frustration, like a puppy.

So he stayed, and his mass crushed her into the bed and compressed her lungs, and she could feel him still inside her and she kept clenching around him because she wanted to draw him into her, ever tighter. 

And then when she was out of air, she had to let him go, and he whipped off like he had been burned and looked at her in concern, and when she saw the look in his eyes all at once years of feelings crashed into her like a wave. She screamed and cried then, for her mother and father and all her dead brothers and Winterfell. She cried for Jory and Ser Roderick and for Theon, too. She cried for being stripped by Joffrey Baratheon, married to Tyrion Lannister and beaten by Ramsay Bolton. She cried for every time Lord Baelish touched her and kissed her and lied to her. She cried for her stupidity in refusing to go when he offered to take her that night and for all the thousand thousand forks of ways her life could have gone and did and didn’t and how she was here now and how she finally felt like she had what she wanted. 

She just screamed and sobbed and screamed some more into her pillow and she meant to stop but the rage and pain just kept washing over her.

She heard him joke, weakly, “It wasn’t _that_ bad, was it?” and then he got up and found a rag and opened the door and grabbed a handful of snow. He cleaned himself  and cleaned her up gently, too, with that ice-cold rag.

He found something to eat and offered “You hungry?” but she wouldn’t have it so he shrugged. And then finally she ran out of tears, and when she raised her head, sniveling and snotty, he got back into bed, and pulled her into his arms and told her she looked like shit, with a look on his face that said he wasn’t so displeased with her anyway. 

She wiped her tears and her snot with a corner of the sheet, and tried to pull herself together. 

She wanted to fuck him again, badly—they had so little time to waste—but she needed to know.

“Do you have the dreams, too?”

He nodded hesitantly, like he was admitting to a terrible crime.

She touched the burn scar on his arm and a scar on his abdomen that looked like a little cross. She saw that it was dark as pitch outside, and she heard the wind picking up, but their little fire and the furs and the body heat between the two of them was enough to keep warm now. 

“You don’t have these scars when I dream you, but you mostly look like you do now. I think I did it. I think I do it. I think I made them happen,” she confessed. “And dogs—real dogs. They listen to me.” 

He took that in and looked surprised and then exasperated.

“I should have known you were a witch,” he huffed.

“I’m not a witch!” she insisted. 

He pointed a finger in her face: “Casts spells, enchants men, controls animals? _Witch_.”

“I’m not! Well, I didn’t mean to be. Truly. I didn’t mean it. I’m so sorry,” was all she knew to say.

“Don’t you dare fucking apologize to me. Don’t you _dare,_ ” and he was truly angry with her then, for some reason she didn’t entirely grasp. 

“But...”

“I swear I will break your damn neck,” he said and he wanted her to believe it, too, but of course she didn’t. He shook his head then. “I used to feel like such a shitheel back in King’s Landing. You were a bloody newborn and I had these dreams where...the way you sang for me was just like tonight, so pretty and sweet and impossible.”

“I don’t think I even saw your face until I got to the Vale,” she said. “But then once I did, they started coming all the time—more often and so much _clearer_. Since I’ve been in Winterfell with Jon and everyone, they’re so real and I feel like I'm...” 

“Like you’re deciding what happens?” 

“Yes,” she nodded, feeling somewhat abashed. She thought she might be blushing, and she put a hand to her own cheek to see if it was really so hot, and it was.

“I don’t know who started this or why, but it doesn’t matter now. You’re all I’ve ever wanted, bird, and I think having you with me, singing in my head—I think it kept me alive. Or killed me. Maybe both.”

She laughed, and kissed him on the lips, and he looked at her, amazed all over again at where they were and what they were doing.

And then lifetimes of pent-up lust caught up with them again.

“I’m going to do things to you now. Don’t fight me too much,” he said, and he got in his knees and spread her legs a little and climbed between them and pulled her down the bed by her ankles so she was lying down flat on her back. 

She listened to the wind outside, so strong she was sure it was blowing trees sideways, as he kissed her from head to toe.

There were so many places on her body that she didn’t even know kisses could go.

He kissed every corner of her face—her eyelids! He nibbled on her earlobes. He _licked_ her neck and sucked on her pulse points until she was sure the skin would pucker as if she’d been in the bath too long. Collarbones, breastbone, every rib—he counted them with kisses. He nosed her breasts and used his teeth on her nipples. He kissed under her armpit and she giggled because it tickled and she asked, “ _What_ are you doing?” and he growled and said, “I told you not to fight me.” So she let him and he still does that sometimes to this day. She thought it was very strange, but she also understood because she loved the smell of him, too, and having him be hers, and every hair on his body. 

He kissed the inside of her elbows and as she lay there, boneless and still a bit stunned at what was happening to her, she realized she’d not really understood what _he’s so big_ had meant. She saw that he didn’t properly fit in this bed, or probably any bed.  

She made a presumptuous mental note to hire a joiner to rebuild the bed in the Lord’s chamber at Winterfell so that he would have space to stretch out or toss in his sleep. She realized that in her dreams she’d vastly underestimated his height and breadth and...everything, no doubt because the only men she’d ever seen naked were her two legal husbands, the dwarf and the hairless weasel, and maybe, _maybe_ , she’d seen some _part_ of her father or Robb or Theon or Jon all those years ago when she was a child.

In her dreams she’d constructed some half-true version of him that borrowed from memory and from what she’d scraped out of his own mind and combined it with bits and pieces of experience. It was like snowmelt into rivulets into streams into rivers, by the time the water reached the ocean you couldn’t find the snowmelt anymore. 

He kneaded one breast, and sucked on the other and then switched, and she thought again that she’d run with him if she had too. They could go across the Narrow Sea if it came to that, but she wouldn’t give _him_ up now, not for anything. Not for Winterfell. Not for 8,000 years of Starks. To borrow a phrase her husband might use, “Fuck ‘em.”

As he kissed her belly button, and her hip bones, and inside of her thighs, behind her knees, the curve of her ankles, that spot where the little joint bone was visible in her ankle, the arch of her foot, and then all the way back up again, she realized she already thought of him as her man, her husband, in some kind of mystical way. 

They weren’t married.

Maybe he wouldn’t want to be.

Maybe someone would try to forbid it.

But it felt like he was hers, and she was his, and that was that. 

“Can we get married?” she’d asked.

His mouth was somewhere between her belly button and her...the place between her legs...when she asked that, and he just lifted his head up and looked up at her, annoyed.

“Shut the fuck up,” he said quietly. He pushed her legs further apart then, and _licked_ her down there and kissed her and _sucked_ on parts of her and she was terrified and horrified and also _sevenhellsohmygodsallthegods_.

And he put his finger inside her, first one finger and then two. Ramsay had put...things—objects—inside her, but this was different. This was good. She didn’t know how to say the words for what she wanted but she wanted something desperately and he finally had to pin her hips down to the bed with his other hand.

After she got what she wanted, he smiled down at her smugly and said, “That was your prettiest song yet, bird.” 

“Shut the fuck up,” she sassed back, quietly, embarrassed at what had just happened. And then he laughed a big open-mouthed laugh of rejoicment at her improbable use of those words.

"Turn over," he said. She did.

He crawled behind her and pulled her hips up. When he slid inside her, she closed her eyes, all the better to feel the way her heart clenched at the feeling of his heat inside her and his warmth behind her.

He wrapped his arms around her, one over her shoulder and one around her belly, her right breast in his left hand. Then he plunged into her over and over again until he came, and then when he released her, she nestled into the bed and smiled. Now, she could, at last, slip into a deep, dreamless sleep.


	2. A second day

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's snowing so hard in the North that no one can travel further than their front door, so Sansa and Sandor are granted another day together in the gamekeeper's hut before they're caught. Whatever will they do with that time?

When she woke up she saw that he’d pulled one of the chairs to the edge of the bed and was sitting there, watching her, his bare feet resting on the edge of the bedrame. He looked pensive, and he was wearing his breeches and his tunic, neither of which she was happy to see.

“Are the horses all right?”

“Fed and watered. Stranger is irritable about being stabled, but that’s his usual condition.”

“What time is it?”  
  
“Morning, I think, but I can’t tell. You Northerners aren’t kidding about the Long Night. Eat and drink now.”

“You feeding and watering me, too?”

“So it would seem.”

She gave him the gesture that means “Hold on,” and scrambled out of the bed naked to take a couple of pieces of firewood off the stack by the fireplace and feed them to the dying fire. Her feet suffered from the cold flagstone floor, but it couldn’t be helped. Then she climbed back in the bed and wrapped herself in a bearskin and obediently ate the dried apple rings and hard cheese that he handed her.

“I don’t know how to talk to you,” he said, slowly.

“That much is obvious,” she said, smiling.

He searched for something in his mind—she could see it in the way his eyes seemed to be scanning—and then looked a little defeated. He swallowed and then decided to say his piece.

“I would die for you,” he said, with that truth and so much more in his eyes.

She didn’t want to laugh at him, he wouldn’t like it, but she couldn’t keep from smiling fondly at him, like he was a misbehaving pet. She wanted to tell him he was sweet and silly, but he wouldn’t like that either.

“I would strongly prefer if you did _not—_ die for me, that is. Stay alive, if you can,” she said, and then she became afraid because she had a moment’s glimpse of how she would feel if one day someone brought her his cold, broken, lifeless body.

There was a moment of silence between them.

“That thing you asked about. That’s a terrible idea,” he said.

“Terrible? Really?” she asked, keeping a light sound in her voice.

“You’re the goddamn princess of the North. Hell if I’m fit for that. Come on,” he said, scoffing as easily as if they were discussing whether or not he should ride a mammoth or climb the Wall.

“Well, then as one of the House Stark’s truest friends, would you kindly tell me the name of the man who ought to be my husband? So very many people have ideas about whom I should marry. I’d truly like to hear your notion of it. Name him,” she said. She stuck her chin out a bit and her eyes felt angry and she knew that the wolf inside her was baring its teeth, just a little. “Name him!”

He looked stricken.

_Good. Stew in it._

“They already call me Lady Lannister and Lady Bolton behind my back. I don’t care what they call me but my children _must_ be called Stark. Jon is a trueborn Targaryen, but even if he were a bastard, that he’s Lyanna’s son and not my father’s means he’s truly _fourth_ in line for Winterfell, after Bran, then me and then Arya. Bran thinks he’s a tree god and Arya won’t have children, I don’t think, and I won’t bear children for _anyone else—_ I won’t let anyone touch me like that ever again. Anyone except you. _I won’t._ I swear by all the gods, old and new, I will throw myself from top of the Broken Tower before that happens,” she said. She sighed, feeling defeated somehow. “Never mind. Forget it. I don’t expect anything from you. I...should have gone with you that night and I didn’t and I have no right to ask you for anything. I know that.” She felt tears welling behind her eyes and had to squeeze her eyelids shut to keep those tears from emerging.

“Bird,” he said, annoyed. Her eyes flew open. She glared at him.

“Hound,” she said, equally annoyed.

“Sansa!” he said, still annoyed.

“Sandor,” she said. She’d never spoken his name aloud before. Certainly not just his first name, as though they were familiar to each other. She always called him _thehound_ or _sandorclegane_ in her mind, as much a title as a name.

Sandor. Sandor. Sandor. She wanted to say it again and again, rolling it on her tongue.

“Look, I’ll give you anything you want, I will, but...you aren’t thinking straight,” he said.

“Don’t patronize me. I am not a child,” she said. “I am a woman, and I want to be a mother to your children. Bastards, true-borns, I don’t care. My sons and daughters will be yours or they will not exist and House Stark will pass from this world, once and for all.”

“Bastards? You said they have to have your name. Northern bastards are Snow,” he said, as if she didn’t know know all that.

“I am Wardeness of the North and if we survive all this, my brother will be King or at the very least consort to the Queen. If the gods see fit to give me a baby without a father, my brother and I would legitimize him or her at birth. And even in a scenario where the father is someone else, other than you, that man would almost certainly be born of a lesser house than mine. Only a trueborn child whose father was heir to one of the great houses would be called by his father's name. The only surviving candidates that I can think whose name would supplant mine are my cousin Robin Arryn, or the Kingslayer himself, or Tyrion if Jaime Lannister dies and Tyrion inherits Casterly Rock, and _perhaps_ Arya’s friend if the Targaryens for some reason wanted to legitimize him Baratheon, which I personally find unlikely--but stranger things have happened.”

“Robin Arryn? That Jon Arryn’s boy?” asked Sandor Clegane with a new tension in his body that wasn’t there a minute before. He put his feet on the ground and leaned forward with his arms resting on his thighs. His shoulders were hunched and she saw him thinking hard, remembering something and adding it up with something else.

“Yes. Have you met him?” she said, innocent as can be.

“No, Arryn never brought him to court,” grunted her Hound.

“Yes. Well, he’s sure to be a great warrior like his father, and we _are_ fond of each other other after my time in the Vale,” she continued.

His eyes widened at the same moment his jaw tightened and his nostrils flared, and she felt a _little_ guilty, but she was also a little glad to know that he gave a damn about the potential suitors for her hand.

“He’d take me from Winterfell, though. I’d have to live at the Eyrie. And as I said, the children would be Arryn, not Stark, which I _will not abide_ ,” she said, thinking that she was a fool for wasting a minute of this time talking about the likes of Sweetrobin, but maybe she would also be a fool to _not_ use what she could, to make him see the truth about her, and him, and them together.

“Would you like to hear about the method I planned to use to kill myself if we lost the Battle of the Bastards? Poor Jon never asked because he couldn’t bear to think of it, but I could tell you, if you’d like. I’m fully prepared to execute my plans if someone besides you ever presumes to share my bed again.”

At that, he suddenly looked like a bull ready charge, snorting out of his nose and shifting his feet so as to have better position when he launched himself forward.

And then, suddenly, he looked up at the ceiling of the little woodsman’s shack where they were sheltered. His shoulders dropped, and he gave her a resentful angry look that would have frightened her if she didn’t know better.

“ _Fine._ Keep your mutt if you get it, but I won’t marry you until the war is over. Hell if I’m going to die and leave you alone to be called Lady Clegane by any of these sons of bitches. You’ve suffered enough, don’t you think?”

“I’m unhappy to hear that,” she said but it was, partly, a lie, because she knew then that she had the end of the rope in hand and now it was only a matter of time before she pulled him in all the way.

“Every whore between here and Sunspear is the fatherless daughter of some soldier, you know that, right?” he said, irate and sounding almost incoherent, to her ear.

“Our daughter won’t become a prostitute,” she said, serenely. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore. Stand up, please.”

Docile as a lamb, he did as he was told.

“Take off your clothes, please,” she commanded. “I know it’s freezing. I’m sorry for that.”

He did as she bid, watching her all the time, and she stepped out of the bed, and her nipples immediately hardened against the frigid air, and she got goosebumps all over.

“What are you doing, little bird?” he asked, with a tiny smile on his face that made her feel so gratified after having just argued with him.

“I just want to see you. The fire is good right now, and I’ve never really seen you--all of you,” she smiled.

“Sansa!” he chided.

“Innocent as a maid,” she teased.

“It’s freezing!” he protested.

“Oh, you’re fine,” she giggled.

She circled him then, slowly, determined to get her eyeful while she could. If the day came when they had to be parted, perhaps the gods would still grant her some shadow of him in her dreams.

She saw that his back was like a wall. So broad and muscled, from the shoulders tapering down in a V shape to his bum. She thought that later she would run her fingers up and down his spine, if she could, and pet, especially, the heavy muscles around his shoulder blades. His legs were skinnier than his torso would suggest, but his chest and his belly and his thighs and his calves were really nothing but skin over thick bands of muscle, like the huge coils of rope used on a ship. Black hair spread all over his body from his beard on down to his ankles. He had hair on his shoulders, hair on his back, hair on his toes; lots of hair between his legs with his...cock and balls.

As she thought the words she squeaked a little bit inside, but it didn’t seem so shocking and shameful if the words described him. She liked his cock very much--she saw that it was stiffening and curving upward under her hungry gaze—and yes, she also liked the wrinkly sack that sat behind it. One side of the sack hung a little lower than the other. Was that as it was supposed to be? She’d never wanted to look at Ramsay. She clenched her eyes shut whenever possible, although sometimes he hit her for it.

“Hey,” said Sandor. Sandor. Sandor. Sandor. “Hey. Girl.”

He was trying to bring her back from where she’d gone, a place that made her brow furrow and her mouth turn down.

She inhaled through her nose and exhaled out through her mouth.

“You’re wonderful. Lovely,” she said.

He snorted at that, but looked down at her kindly, and reached out a hand toward her. Whether he meant to touch her where she stood or to pull her toward him, she wasn’t sure.

His wonderful hands.

She took what was offered and pulled that beloved hand toward her cheek, and dropped the whole weight of her head into it, and closed her eyes. If a person could pick their seven heavens, this would be one of hers.

“Get in bed,” she said, without opening her eyes.

He hooked her with his arm as he moved past her and pulled her back into the bed with him.

He was behind her, curled around her. They worked together to rebuild a nest of furs and for a minute or two they simply burrowed in it together, his...cock--his cock slotted along the valley between her buttocks, his arms wrapped around her, his nose in her hair. Their ankles were tangled together. She stroked his forearms as they warmed each other.

He cupped her breasts, and she wiggled her bum into him, and she felt him get harder. He tugged on her nipples and her grinding sped up. He pulled away from her and reached a hand between her legs.

“This—,” he said, touching the place between her legs, “is so much prettier than in my dreams. I didn’t have the right colors.”

She bucked upwards into his hand, and he teased her slit with his fingers, front to back, over and over again.

“We’re going to be snowed in, like you said,” he mumbled into her neck.

“I’m always getting trapped in places, but this is the first time I’ve ever enjoyed it,” she said. She realized as she said it that she’d gotten out of the habit of smiling but she liked how a smile felt on her lips and cheeks. She was getting slick between her legs as he ran his finger over her slit, smearing the wetness around, and playing with the swollen nub at the top. She pushed into his hand again, thinking of those fingers he’d put inside her before.

“I also have so many questions for you about so many things. Are you going to hate it if I ask my questions?” she wanted to know.

“Probably, my sweet bird, but I can take it if you can,” and then his nuzzled into her ear with his nose and that was strange and wonderful, too.

“I’ll make it worth your while, I promise,” she said because she realized that she wanted so much more than a finger inside her. She flipped over and pushed him down and crawled on top of him. She straddled his crotch and took his cock between her folds. She was wet and slick and as she rubbed against him, it was like silk on silk. He gasped at the feel of her, and his head rolled back. He reached for her hips and tried to hold her down, but she wouldn’t have it. She wanted the tease. So she slipped against him, over and over, and she could feel the length of him and the knob of his cockhead. He kept trying to press her down on him, and then finally she lifted herself up just enough to allow the tip of him to find her entrance.

“Behave,” she said. Let me do this, she told him with her eyes, and he huffed, but also looked at her like she was Irogenia of Lys herself.

She swiveled her hips so that the tip of him was always on the edge of her; there was something about living in the anticipation that particularly thrilled her. His face was a mask of tension, and he clutched at the sheets to keep from grabbing her. When she sunk down just enough to take in that knob and then release it, he practically roared. So she did it again. And again. Finally his eyes flew open, and he looked at her as if he were going to crack in half at the strain.

She took that moment to brush her hand over his great beard, and his lips, so beloved to her already, and that nose, and finally she brushed over his one eyebrow with the pads of her thumb. She dropped little kisses on the scarred side of his forehead, and then she finally sunk down on him, sheathed him completely, and his guttural moan in reaction made her thrill--she had pleased him.

They found a rhythm that reminded her of riding of a horse, but also of being aboard a ship on a strong sea--down into a trough and up into a crest. He stroked and squeezed her buttocks as she rocked over him, and pulled himself up to rough her breasts with his mouth and beard. He pulled on her nipples and sucked at the swell of her breasts until she was sure he would leave a mark.

Then she felt like she was being carried away, clinging to a piece of driftwood amid a rising flood.

She was so close and yet it not there yet, until he nibbled gently on one of her nipples and she shattered and cracked like early-winter ice.

He sat up then, so they were facing each other. They looked into each other’s eyes, then, as he ground into her. Her blue and his gray showing what was so hard for them both to speak into the air. _I adore you. I would do anything for you. I’m here with you for as long as you’ll have me. You are precious to me._ A few more strokes, straight up into her, and he came with a shudder and a groan, and she threw her arms around his neck and buried her face in his collarbone, while his chest hair tickled her sex-roughened nipples.

She felt like she was going to melt into nothingness she was so sated and serene. She pulled back so he could see her face.

“I like that very much,” she said, wide-eyed.

“I’ll bet you do,” he chuckled, squeezing her hip and then caressing her bum with circular strokes of his hand, strokes that made her wiggle and squirm toward him wildly. She batted his hand away because they both needed time to recover from that before they inevitably started this again.

She collapsed on the bed away from him, but couldn’t bear to let go completely, so she took his great paw in hers and stroked the back of his hand with her fingers as they lay there together. _Mine_ , she thought. _You’re mine._ He closed his eyes then, and she was sure he would claim he was just resting them, but after a few minutes she could hear the gentle hiss-buzz snore of a sleeping giant.

Sandor Clegane, at rest, in the firelight, in that little hut, was a picture she would cherish for the rest of her days.

She enjoyed the picture as long as she could stand, but eventually a feeling of shame at her excessive indolence came over her.

The hut hadn’t been occupied since the arrival of winter—the gamekeeper and his son had gone to White Harbor to wait out the Long Night—so dust lay heavy on most of the surfaces, and what household goods there were had been packed away.

She hardly knew what to do but she was overcome by a desire to feather their nest. She put on her shift and her cloak over that, wrapped her hair back with a swatch of burlap she found in a pile of rags, and then got to work. She dusted off the shelves, found a corn broom and swept the floors, found a large blue cloth--not too stained--to lay over the little kitchen table, unpacked their food, and put it in the cupboard.

She picked up the clothes he had dropped in a pile beside the bed and folded them as best she could. The breeches need a patch or two but there was nothing to be done about it without a needle and thread. She collected their shoes and lined them up just inside the door, _one two three four_ , nice and neat. She found a bucket and quietly opened the door to scoop up some snow, and when the snow melted down to water she cleaned herself--the soles of her feet were nearly black!

She found several candle stubs in a tin, collected them all a plate, and placed them on a shelf on the opposite side from where he slept. She wished she could decorate the table with flowers or even pine boughs, but it was not to be.

There wasn’t a mirror to be found nor a bar of soap, so she suspected would look rather unkempt when she returned--if she returned--to Winterfell. She thought she ought to be ashamed at walking around in such a condition, but all she could think was, “Yes, let them see. Let there be no doubt what happened here.”

Still, she couldn’t resist trying to comb out some of the snarls and snags in her hair using her fingers. It hadn’t occurred to her to bring anything like soap or a comb. She’d just thought of how much food he and Arya ate at every meal, and she didn’t want him to suffer from hunger while they were away from home.

She thought then of how he’d come to her the night that Stannis Baratheon's soldiers had landed in the capital.

She’d thought of it so many times over the years. As foolish as she had been in refusing, he was a greater fool even to offer. What kind of lunatic man would trouble himself with the fate of the helpless, bewildered child she had been in those days? It would have been like dragging a cripple through the countryside.

She would have slowed him down immensely—even just her added weight on Stranger—but moreso because of her inability to do anything for herself or be anywhere but her gilded cage, a prison that came complete with handmaidens to dress her, and brush her hair and file her fingernails, and empty her chamber pot. That little girl didn’t have the first idea how to _dress_ herself, much less feed herself, care for a horse, hide, hunt or even _run_ particularly well.

They would have been prey, from the first minute they exited the gates of King’s Landing. Sandor Clegane wouldn’t have made it easy for the predators to take them down, but they would have been hunted just the same.

They were both fools to even dream of doing it--the Lannisters would have tortured him in unspeakable ways if he’d been caught with the King’s intended. And they would have thrown her body to the gold cloaks to use until there was nothing left of her to plunder.

And yet, even though she knew better now, she had indulged herself so many times with fantasies of what might have become of them if she’d run with him that night.

She imagined them in the dark, beside dying campfires, sleeping side-by-side for warmth. She’d imagined them finding an abandoned, secluded farmhouse, not so different from this little shack, and settling down to wait out the war and finding so much comfort and joy there that they decided to stay, under assumed identities, for the remainder of their days. She imagined riding north to Maidenpool or Gulltown and buying passage across the Narrow Sea.

Would they have gone to Lys? To Pentos? Maybe if they’d gone to Volantis she could have found the Maegyrs someday and spoken to them about Talisa and the baby, and begged their forgiveness for the fate of their daughter.

She imagined a house in Essos, too, different from this—it would be a little stuccoed thing with a courtyard. She thought it would have palm trees and pepper trees that cast shade over the yard, and a little burbling fountain, and a coop for laying hens, and flocks of wild parrots that came to squawk at her while she hung out their washing.

She would be a good wife to him, wherever they ended up, if only he’d let her try. She knew she would. It was all she’d ever wanted.

Was it midday, she wondered? Later? The cabin had just one window, a green-glass circle that looked like a porthole. It had once been the bottom of a wine jug and someone had cut it out and fixed into the wall with a clumsy mass of plaster and lime. She peered out into the world that she knew to be glinting white through the green-tinted glass.

The light outside right then was no brighter than the light at the hour of the eel on a summer’s morning, but in winter, in a blizzard, this was as bright as it would get even at the sun’s highest point in the sky.

The hut had a little porch which protected the door a bit from the deepest snow, but with the wind blowing as strongly as it was, the cover was utterly ineffectual at keeping the drifts from their door. The drifts were near tall as her, up to her neck at least.

She thanked the Old Gods for it. Even if someone wanted to come for them and, perchance, knew where to find them, no commander of the guard with any sense would send his men out into this.

Sansa hoped that Arya might speak for them, at least a little, and keep the wolf in Jon from hunting them down in his fear and rage.

Perhaps Bran could explain some of it?

The Three-Eyed Raven might be seeing her now, for all she knew. If the Raven did, indeed, know everything that had happened to all of them, he would know that she was where she belonged. If she was with Sandor Clegane and he had a sword, that she was safer than most women in the world could ever hope to be.

“What are you doing all the way over there?” he said. She thought she ought to have been startled at the sound of his voice, but she wasn’t. Perhaps she’d _felt_ him rouse even without exactly hearing it?

“Oh, you’re awake. A good sleep, I hope. Are you hungry?” she asked. He shook his head.

He made her smile. He looked so sleepy and satisfied. He pulled himself up and clasped his arms behind his head for a stretch, rolling his neck, and leaning back in his hands. The position showed off the definition in the muscles on the underside of his upper arms. She took in the black hair of his armpits, and the color of his nipples and the flare of black hair around them, and the line of hair that ran straight down his middle to the part of him that was covered by the furs.

“Your teeth are chattering. Get in bed,” he said, pointing to the space next to him.

She shook her head no. She had questions and if she was too close to him, physically, he would have it too easy. Three kisses and she’d roll over and show her belly.

“I’m asking my questions now,” she said, smirking a little because she knew he would hate this.

“Fine, do your worst,” he glared.

“What was your mother’s name? Where were her people from?”

“Her name was Asta and I don’t know,” he said.

“Well, where did your grandparents live? Did you have aunts and uncles? Didn’t they come for feast days?” she asked, confused.

“Never met any of them, if they existed. She and my sister died even before the burns, so I don’t remember much, and my father didn’t talk about her once she was gone,” he said.

“Wait. You have--had a sister?” she said, amazed that in the shadow of the infamous Mountain and the dangerous Hound there was still another Clegane.

“Dead,” he said.

“I heard that part. How did she die? What was her name?” she asked.

“Drowned in the mill pond. They said she was trying to chase her toy boat out into the water and lost her footing. She was called Elinor,” he answered.

“Gregor, Sandor, Elinor--that’s beautiful,” said Sansa, running the names over her tongue.

_Sandor. Sandor. Sandor._

“What was your father’s name?”

“Timor,” grunted Sandor. “I left that place the day he died, and I’ve never cared to look back. I don’t think about it much. Just Gregor. Truly. Is that it? Are you done?”

“Oh no, dear Sandor. Hardly. Tell me about your mother. What do you remember about her?” asked Sansa, clasping her hands together in silent supplication. Please, please let me know you. Please.

“Nothing really. Everything from before the burns isn’t really there. The fire is just about my first memory,” he said, waving his hand as though to dismiss it, brush it all away.

She just looked at him, disbelieving and disappointed.

He dropped his chin to his chest and looked away from her, with a quick growl that came from deep in his throat, “There was...there was a street in Flea Bottom that had a sweet shop, like a bakery, but only fancy rolls and cakes, not daily bread. Every time I was near that street—you could smell their spice cake down the road and around the corner. Sometimes when I’d be down there, I’d think, ‘That’s what my mother smelled like.’ But I couldn’t tell you why or anything else about it.”

She smiled at that, a smile that went to her eyes, and she put her clasped hands under her chin. She was pleased.

His eyes narrowed. “Stop plotting spice cake.”

“I’m not plotting spice cake.”

“You fucking are. Just leave it.”

“I’m not _plotting_. Just thinking.”

“You done?”

“No, not yet. Did you have a maester? What was his name? Did you have dogs growing up, dogs like on your sigil? Which was your favorite? What was it like at Casterly Rock? Were they good to you? What was it like being Cersei’s shield before Joffrey? Why did she give you to Joff?”

“Fuck, woman. Seven hells!”

“That’s it. I’m done. I mean, for now.”

He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. He inhaled and then said, “Maester Malthe until I was...nine? And then he died. They said his heart gave out and he fell and hit his head. And then Maester...Villads? Villadin? Villa-something for another year or two. He got kicked in the head by a horse. A lot of head injuries around Clegane Keep. After that they didn’t send any more Maesters. We had a lot of dogs. They all run together. Casterly Rock was...safe. There were a lot more Lannisters back then. Gerion and Tyvek and Kevan and Tywin weren’t exactly a happy band, but they were better at being brothers than the Cleganes, I can say that. Lord Tywin put me to work, and I was good enough at what I did that they didn’t mind feeding me. Roof and a bedroll. Fair exchange.” He cocked his head then, remembering.

“There was a master-at-arms who always noticed when I was growing out of shit. He’s the one who always gave me my boots. Cersei was...easy to look at. I remember her screaming her head off when the raven came about the Prince. At first, she didn’t want to marry Lord Robert of House Baratheon. When that came to pass, she threw an absolute fit. Lord Lannister locked her up for three days without food and water. It was my job to stand watch, and keep anyone from slipping her anything. I think Jaime finally came home and convinced Tywin to let her out. And she gave me to Joff because he was always a dangerous little shit and he needed someone strong around him—he never saw His Grace or the Kingslayer, and she’d...she’d already lost the thread with him, I think."

He let out a deep sigh.

That felt like the most she’d ever heard speak at one time. He looked miserable.

“Thank you,” she said, feeling like her voice had a childish squeak to it. She hadn’t meant to torment him with bad memories, she just wanted to know more about what made him him.

“If it please you, my lady,” he said glibly, rudely, angrily.

She thought rebelliously: _You’re an ass._

“You’re an ass,” she said out loud, angry too, but surprised even as the words came out of her mouth.

“Lady Sansa of House Stark, what would your septa say about such foul language?” he retorted.

“Nothing kind,” she said.

“Don’t look so ashamed of yourself. I don’t know how you lords and ladies talk about anything if you can’t say the real words for things,” he said.

“Lords do say those words. For us, speaking those words is the evidence that you’re not truly a lady,” she said.

“Bullshit,” he declared. “Get over here. Come on,” he said, gesturing to the same space beside him and pulling back the furs so she could climb right in beside him.

She pulled the burlap wrap from her head and shrugged off the cloak she’d been clutching around her, and hung it back behind the door. She brushed her hands over his cloak as she did so.

She wanted to clean it, and trim it with fur. It was too small for him, and it didn’t fit quite right, and it certainly wasn’t suited for a northern winter. She’d been collecting sable furs to make a cape for Arya, but now she wanted to use them to edge his cloak. The colors would go well and it would give it extra length, not to mention that the weighted hem would keep out at least a little more of the chill wind.

“Now, woman! You’ve been shaking like a wet bird trying to dry her feathers since I woke up. Bed,” he insisted.

She complied and he immediately wrapped himself around her, she nestled into arms and the moment she was there and closing her eyes she felt like she would fall asleep there and never wake up and that was quite all right.

“Hmmm...I was going to teach you all the filthy words I know, but I just want to hold you instead, while I can. I can’t believe they haven’t come to rescue you yet,” he whispered into her ear.

“I left a note so Jon wouldn’t worry, but I don’t expect it will work,” she whispered back. “This isn’t exactly what he’s come to expect from me. I’m sure he’ll think that I was tricked or...something. Brienne is going to be livid.”

“Not to mention there are the Others. And the Golden Company. And the Ironborn. Any of whom could set upon us at any time,” he said, glaring at the door as he did.

“Not to mention them,” she sighed. She felt a little guilty about luring him away from his battles, but she knew that he’d already done his share--they said he’d killed more White Walkers than anyone, even Jon. And when this time, here, was over, he would go out again and fight for them, and he could die, or she could die, and couldn’t they at least have this one happy memory to live on if it came to that?

“If they take my head for this, it was worth it,” he said with a kiss to her temple. He ran a hand up and down her free arm, trying to warm it up.

“That might be the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me, but I’m _not_ going to let them take your head! Don’t be ridiculous. Jon will understand. He’s not--he’s not like that. If nothing else he needs his soldiers right now, but even in peacetime, he’s—he says he hates killing, and I don’t think he’d do it unless he had to--and he doesn’t have to,” she finished, lamely.

“He hates killing? I find that surprising,” said Sandor, almost to himself.

“Why?” she asked.

“He’s very good at it. He’s either a natural, or he was trained well, or both. I imagine your red brother was much same,” he said, pushing his hair back from his eyes on his scarred side as he did.

“The red brother? ...Robb?” she asked, confused.

“I guess. In my head, I call him them the red brother and the black brother from seeing them in—” he said, but he didn’t finish, because the dreams still felt like a secret they weren’t allowed to tell.

“In the dreams,” she finished for him.

“Yes,” he agreed. “Who’s the one who doesn’t belong, and not just because his face is wrong? He fancies you. I can see it.”

“Fancies me?”

“Yes. Fancies you. Any man with eyes would fancy you, little bird,” he said, off-handedly.

“I’m going to get old someday, you know that, don’t you?” she said, afraid for a moment that if it was only her beauty that he wanted that someday he would turn away from her to someone else.

“I hope with all my heart that’s true, bird,” he said, with eyes that told her it was indeed his fond wish that her hair silver and her skin wrinkle, breasts sag and shoulders hunch. Will he still want me when I’m a crone? Really? She then thought of him, old, leaning on a cane because his bad leg too far gone to be of any use, white-bearded, very long past fighting age. Liver spots.

Yes, she would still want _him_ , want to be with him, always. She knew she would. Maybe he truly felt the same about her.

“He thought he’d take you for his wolf bride. I can see it his eyes, even in the dreams,” said Sandor, resigned.

“Theon?! No, you’ve got it all wrong. He’s—that’s Theon, of House Greyjoy, rightful heir to the Salt Throne of the Iron Islands.” She sighed then. “He came to us after Father helped put down the Greyjoy Rebellion. And then, later—he thought he was capturing Winterfell for his family, but he was merely serving himself up on a platter for the Boltons to nibble on like the corpse rats they were. I feel for him—because I did the same bloody thing.”

Sandor kissed her cheek then, and whispered into her skin, desperately: “I’m so sorry, little bird. I should have taken you. I should have—I was weak, pathetic about it, because I wanted something from you, but I _knew_. I knew what I was leaving you to. I didn’t know their faces or their names—”

“Shhhhh...shhhhh...” she whispered back. “Get out of there. It’s a trap. We have this now, and we might even have a future, but just be here with me now. We’ll make ourselves sick if we go back there. Come here with me, now.”

His mouth remained in a frown, his brow furrowed.

Then he raised his head: “Wait, I have a question, too.”

“Ask it,” she said.

“Sometimes I see you with black hair. I fucking hate it. I wouldn’t dream that if it were up to me. Why do I see that?” he asked, reaching pull her hair from below her neck and out onto her shoulder. He stroked it and wrapped it around his hand.

“That’s funny. I don’t think I would dream that either, but maybe it’s not for us to decide—not completely, I suppose. Littlefinger said it would protect me to change my hair from red to black. I think he just wanted to change me so I looked more like him—and felt less like myself.”

He smiled then. Proud of her, she could tell. Arya must have told him about the execution of Petyr Baelish, Lord of Harrenhal, in the great hall at Winterfell. She’d learned from that experience to do executions outside if at all possible. They’d salted the bloodstain and scrubbed it for days, but you could still see a color difference in the mortar between the stones.

“Look at me, girl,” he said. Wasn’t that what he’d said to her so many times in King’s Landing? She thought so, but as much as she’d turned those memories over and over in her mind, they were fading, dun-color now, in contrast to everything since he’d been back, everything since they’d been in this room.

She turned her face toward him, so he knew she was listening.

“I will never leave you again, whether you will it or no. If you banish me, I’ll be in your wolfswood. If you marry some cocksucker because you think you have to or because you want to, I’ll stand there and fucking watch. I’m standing behind you forever, girl, and I’m...listening to you forever. I won’t go away again. Know that,” he promised, as close to an oath as he would get, she thought, and she adored him for it.

“You’re a bloody fool,” she told him.

“That’s true,” he agreed with a sigh.

“I really don’t know any other ways to say that you’re the only man I would ever marry. You’re my husband or no one is. Know _that_ ,” she said, willing him to believe her.

He looked at her for a moment, ever skeptical, ever suspicious. She tried to show him with her eyes that she meant every word.

“Fuck me,” he said, in a voice that suggested he was starting to believe her pledges and yet still didn’t want to trust her.

“If it please you, my lord,” she teased with a tiny smile. She realized that making love to him—with him—would the habit, the rhythm, that measured out all the rest of her days, however many or few they were granted.

She was determined to make use of this day, this hour—whatever it was they had before they went back to Winterfell and the war and all the people she served as Wardeness of the North. Serving them had surprised her by becoming the greatest honor of her life to date, but to go on, to be strong for them, she needed this.

It felt criminal, like stealing, but she drew so much of her strength from him, it felt like it came right out of his body and every time she touched him she was renewed. She prayed that what she took did him no harm, but...

“Does it hurt? The dreams? The singing? What happens between us? I don’t even know what to call it. Does it hurt you?” she asked.

“Does it hurt?” he replied, astonished at the question. “No. It doesn’t hurt. I mean, no more than being alive the normal way. And fuck, when the big bitch beat me and Arya left me for dead, I...I can’t explain it, but the fucking singing kept me alive. Everything was pain and stink, and I was alone, and I just wanted to disappear from the world and be done with it. I kept praying to pass out and never wake up, but I always did, I always woke up and I was still fucking alive. When I think of those days out there, I just remember the blue sky with clouds sailing over and the night sky with all those stars, and your goddamn voice. You sang raunchy marching songs you had no right to know. I’d bet a hundred silver stags you couldn’t sing most of those songs if you had a knife to your throat. I heard you laughing too, and I know I never heard that in truth. I would remember. I don’t know. You were just there with me. I hated you so much for it, and your bitch sister too, but I lived because of the both of you.”

He sighed and looked at her warily.

And then she kissed him, every corner of him, especially every scar. She found one on his back where he said the arrowhead had shattered on impact and they’d never been able to find all the pieces so they just stayed under there. She kissed the burn scars on his face, and the burn scar on his arm, and so many scars from cuts and arrowheads and crossbow bolts. She kissed the straight scars on his palms that looked like he’d grabbed a blade with his bare hands—but no one would do that, least him. She kissed the divot in his leg that was why he limped now. She could feel the space where the muscle was supposed to be and was just gone, replaced only by an inadequate, leathery knot of scar tissue.

She kissed that scar, and then she kissed the tops of thighs—so much muscle despite all the damage—and the inside of his thighs and he gasped, “Bird” and she blinked, trying to not to look as wicked as she felt, “Hound?”

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“None of your business,” she replied, and went back to kissing him. Thighs, hip bones, the seam where the muscles in his abdomen pointed to her final destination. Then she kissed his cock, and it jumped for her. She kissed the side of his ballsack that hung a little higher than the other, and she felt that clench and quiver under her touch. She giggled.

Back to the cock: She touched it, gently. She knew she could be rougher. She’d seen Ramsay prepare himself before he came to her to beget would-be heirs, and she’d been amazed at how fiercely he pulled on himself. She would be rougher, but first she wanted to know Sandor Clegane’s cock for herself.

The skin was like satin, satin over steel. So much of the rest of him felt rough, all hair and scars and calluses, worn and torn over so many years of fighting, but the skin of his cock was so soft. She touched the little slit at the top of the knob and felt a drop of wetness there. She stroked the length of him with one finger, just to feel him, then two, then her whole hand. He groaned, deeply.

Oh, how she loved to hear that sound. She loved every sound that came out of his mouth. Maybe someday she would read to him from a book about knights and fair maidens, and he would read something back to her. She’d like to hear some of those stories told in his voice.

She put her hand under his balls and cupped them. How funny—she could feel little stones inside him. They felt like unshelled hazelnuts. Maybe that was why this was sometimes called the nuts?

He groaned again, his eyes shut, and his hands fisted at his sides. Poor dear Hound. She held onto him then, at the root, and licked the rest of him that wasn’t surrounded by her hand, and she liked the sounds she heard out of him at that.

Encouraged, she took him, whole, into her mouth.

Oh, gods, she truly loved the steel of him. Her sword. Hers. She licked and pulled—she noticed he gasped and groaned especially when she did that, so she kept going, and she felt him pushing up into her mouth, thrusting like when they were together, and it was hard to stay with him, but she persevered and sucked and sucked and then she heard him call out, “Oh, bird. Bird. Bird. Sansa. Sansa!” and he burst into her mouth.

She found she liked the shock of thick wet salt in her mouth, and she stayed with him until it was all out of him and into her. She swallowed it down and was glad that she had yet more of him inside her. She would get no heirs from this—neither true-born nor bastard—but she found that she didn’t mind one bit. Every moment they were together he was more hers and she more his and she knew that the gods themselves understood the truth of it.


	3. "But I do learn."

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sandor's not quite so on edge after spending some time balls deep in Sansa. What do they reveal--and try--as they become increasingly comfortable with each other?

“Should we do something about that?”

“I don’t know. This is usually a special time between me and my hand,” he said.

“You’re...funny,” she said, marveling. All she’d ever seen of him in King’s Landing was some combination of rage, indifference and drunkenness.

“Don’t look so shocked,” he said, affronted.

“I’m not _shocked_. I just didn’t know. There’s so much I just don’t know about you. You know, if you didn’t always assume the worst about me, this would be easier,” she said.

“I’ve been assuming the worst about _everybody_ since before you were born, woman. Don’t know if that can change, or should—it’s kept me alive this long,” he said.

“I’m not your enemy,” she said, reaching for the half-hard cock that lay over her hip. She pulled on it, gently, then harder. She realized couldn’t even circle it with her whole hand—was his cock very large or her hands very small, or both?

“No, not my enemy,” he rumbled into her hair.

She pulled and stroked him and felt him stiffen. She slipped one of her legs between his two, and slung the other leg over his hip and ground her cunt over the rough hair of his rock-hard thighs, while she stroked him to full hardness. Grinding herself on his thigh wasn’t what she ultimately wanted but it was a respectable short-term substitute.

A bead of liquid emerged from the tip of his cock and she smeared it around the head. He grunted and nudged her off his leg, pushing her onto her back. Reaching between her legs, he spread her lips apart and dragged a knuckle over her slit. She felt herself begin to get wet and reflexively pushed toward his hand. They lay entangled like that for a long time, her head tucked under his chin, him breathing and whispering into her hair, her hand tugging on his cock while his fingers stroked her wet folds and dipped into her until he was thrusting wildly into her hand, and she was lifting her hips far off the bed, seeking ever more pressure and speed.

He suddenly pulled away to climb on top of her, nudging her legs apart with his knees. He slid into her smoothly, bracing himself over her with his huge arms. She coiled her left arm all the way around his arm until her hand rested over the muscle of his vast bicep. She reveled in the feel of the strength there, felt it flex under her hand as he held his upper body above her while his lower body rammed into her.

Her other hand rested on his back until suddenly he hooked up her right thigh with his hand and said, “Hold this,” with a wicked arch of his good eyebrow.

Hold what?

She didn’t understand.

Seeing her confusion, he levered that leg further backward. “Never mind. Just leave it here,” he grinned, placing her crooked leg over his shoulder and leaving it there.

It was impossible to think sincerely of “indecency” when she was in a bed with a virtual stranger who was much too old for her and who had been fucking her non-stop for almost two days straight, but this position felt positively _indecent_.

Her legs were spread _so_ far apart, like the blades of her fabric scissors when she sharpened and waxed them. Suddenly his thrusts into her hit her at a whole new angle. She gasped every time he plunged into her, and realized her clit was being pressured by every stroke and it sent shudders through her whole body. Suddenly, a low shimmer of feeling spread from her core outward—her toes curled and she curled her hips up to meet him as she rode out the wave-like sensations. After she came back down from her release and settled into a kind of boneless languor, his pace increased. He was hammering her with such force that she was afraid something would break when she heard that long, low guttural sound that meant he’d found his release as well. He stiffened and stilled, and she felt the twitch of his cock as he unloaded inside her.

She dared, then, to drop her leg off his shoulder, but he caught it in the bend of his arm and slid down to kiss a line down from her knee to her inner thigh, ending with a gentle bite. She squeaked and then wouldn’t let him go. “Do that again,” she urged, squirming. “Do it so hard, so it leaves a mark. I can take it. I want to be able look between my legs on another day and know that you were there.”

“Are you sure, bird?” he asked, uncertain.

“Yes, I’m sure,” she nodded. “Please do it again.”

She hadn’t dreamt much last night but she did see teeth and claws and blood and bite marks. She felt desperate to both mark him and be marked. Perhaps it was another way of becoming man and wife?

He nodded an affirmation and then reached under her naked thigh with both arms and pulled her into him like she was a piece of meat he meant to devour. He bit her hard, and it hurt, and then he sucked and sucked and sucked on her skin, which soothed the pain of the bite and replaced it with a low ache brought on by the fierce suction breaking blood vessels under skin.

“That what you wanted, she-wolf?” he asked, and she nodded and reached for him.

He came up next to her and lay beside her, reaching out an arm to embrace her. She crawled next to him and nuzzled that same hugely muscular arm she’d clung to while he fucked her. Her bum was pressed up against his hip, and she was sopping wet between her legs from where his seed was spilling out of her, but she found she enjoyed the feel of her ruin too much to wipe it away.

 _Please_ , she silently begged the gods, _give us sons. If you can hear me, I want to bear sons by this man. Let him father sons on me. Please. Please._

They curled together then, lazy in the hour of the eel, him brushing his knuckles over her shoulder and upper arm down to her elbow.

She flipped over so she could throw her leg over him again, and trace the muscles of his chest and abdomen, letting her fingers explore his scars and hair and the borders of his nipples.

As she lay there, in the afterglow of their mating, she thought about what Arya had told her about her time with the Hound, how practically the first words he’d said to her were “I’m your father and I’ll do the talking,” and how again and again on their journey people had either presumed that they were father and daughter or they had claimed those roles as a convenience.

Around Winterfell these past weeks, people had come to refer to Arya as "the Hound’s shadow."

They went into battle together. They trained together. She sat beside him, rode beside him, clambered up onto the gates of Stranger’s stall and watched while he curried his beloved stallion.

Arya Stark found Sandor Clegane first thing in the morning and followed him around until late when he would snarl, "Leave me be, girl. I'm an old man. Go find some other children to play with," or "You have two brothers and a sister. What the hell are you bothering me for? Go pester them."

Still, they took all their meals together in the Great Hall, squabbling over who got what bits of the roast game in front of them. He’d bat her hand out of the way when she reached for a part he wanted—no, drumstick’s mine!—but he’d just as casually turn the serving dish around toward her so she could pull the medallions off the chicken, or he’d crack the bone at the joints to tear the thighs away from the pheasant, and then drop them on the side of the plate closest to her.

He leaned against the wall outside Gendry’s forge while Arya talked to her friend and then, according to Arya, when they left, every time, _without fail_ , he’d gripe, “Doesn’t that kid own a shirt?”

Sansa had watched time and time again as Jon Snow had looked at them, bewildered that his beloved little sister favored the scarred giant—the Lannister’s Dog!—over any other companion, even him. She imagined his feeling of rejection mirrored her own feelings about the Hound’s initial ruthless avoidance of her.

The truth was that Jon and Arya had both changed so much. Arya was half-feral. Jon was a very important person: a King, sometimes, but general commander of the dragon’s armies, certainly, and enraptured lover and husband of Queen Daenerys of House Targaryen.

 _His_ childhood was long past—Jon was a father of the realm now, and he felt responsible for the lives or deaths of hundreds of thousands.

Arya, meanwhile, still had a few bits of childhood on her, like a newborn chick who has cracked out of the shell but still has bits of it stuck to her wet feathers. She wasn’t a little girl, but nor was she yet completely a woman.

She was a Northerner but she was almost more well-traveled than any of them, certainly Jon, who had spent nearly all of the days of his life in the North, either in Winterfell or at the Wall. The complexity made her interesting and also separated her from all of them, a little.

Arya was confounding, distant and self-assured.

Jon was as brooding and preoccupied as ever, consumed with the Night King and Cersei alike, not to mention his intense devotion to the personal well-being of the woman he privately called Dany.

For whatever reason, Arya’s relationship with her one-time favorite brother Jon was now...remote. Whereas her relationship with the Hound—renewed almost the moment that Sandor Clegane set foot in Winterfell—was nearly effortless, and enthusiastic.

She annoyed him with endless questions. Sansa had watched from a distance many times—greedy for some piece of the Hound, even if only secondhand through her sister—as he claimed to be much put-upon by her inquiries and utterly unable to help her, and then soon thereafter barked a brief, limited answer.

Arya nudged him then, like a puppy using her whole head to demand attention from a friend, and his short answer would expand into something longer, and then he would tolerate further questions.

Sometime later he would realize he’d again ended up somewhere he didn’t mean to go. He would complain mightily, try to drive Arya away, and fail; then the cycle would begin again.

But as much as he complained, Sansa saw the truth of it.

A horse had once startled near Arya and the Hound, kicking and rearing and threatening to break loose from the ropes that bound him. Without so much as looking at Arya, the Hound stepped in front of her, pushing her wholly behind his body. Before that dangerous thing got to _her_ , it would have to go through _him_.

They went off to fight White Walkers together with their Valyrian steel blades, and Arya never came back from a fight with so much as a scratch, while the Hound more than once returned with a black eye or a bleeding cut. Sansa suspected that the difference was not in Arya’s superiority in close combat but in the Hound repeatedly coming between Arya and shattering attacks by their enemies.

Furthermore, Sansa saw that whenever anyone approached the two of them—anyone—Arya and the Hound immediately either leaned toward each other or literally stepped closer to each other before engaging the newcomer.

They decided together, without even speaking about it, if they trusted you or they didn’t. For example, when Tormund Giantsbane approached, their faces opened. When a one-eyed mystic called Beric Dondarrion approached, they both casually fingered their swords—same for Ser Bronn of the Blackwater, who had never been anything but kind and friendly to Sansa in King’s Landing.

When Brienne passed by they were gracious enough, cordial even—but not altogether warm.

One day Tyrion Lannister had approached them in the Great Hall and Arya had been visibly eager to speak with him—that is, until she saw the Hound’s face, with its barely disguised distaste, and then Arya’s enthusiasm instantly turned to disdain. As Lannister and Clegane spoke through gritted teeth, Arya wore, continuously, what could only be described as a war face—she was ready for battle, if called upon to fight, and her side was long since chosen.

Sansa wondered if Arya and Sandor even knew the nature of their bond. Would either of them admit to it? What would they call it if they had to name it?

Sansa would say that the Hound was Arya’s friend, and Arya was his, but there was something more than that. It looked and smelled and tasted to her like blood.

The Hound was family. He belonged with them. She thought about him leaving them someday and felt, with great certainty, that if Sandor Clegane was gone again that she and Arya would surely be lost as well.

_He’s our family now._

_Please let him know that._

_Please let him believe that._

“I liked the leg thing,” she said, breaking the silence. If they didn’t speak, there was no noise anywhere around them but for the fire in the hearth.

“Mmmmm...me too,” he said, distant.

“Thank you for what you did for Arya,” she said.

She could have sworn she felt his mouth twitch, but he said nothing.

“Thank you for what you did for my dearest sister,” she said, firmly.

He grunted and looked away from her. She sighed, heavily, and reached for his chin so she could turn his face toward her. "Look at me," she said, raising her eyebrows emphatically." _Thank you_ for what you did for my sister, Arya of House Stark. You saved her. _Thank you._ Now you say, 'You’re welcome.' "

He wanted to flee. She could see it. But he finally, with just the tip of his finger, touched the tip of her nose and then her chin, and said, "You’re welcome."

And with that he untangled from her and hefted himself out of bed. "I'll see to the horses now," he said, pulling on his clothes.

She _should_ help him with his cloak or his boots, but under the covers was _warm_ and outside the bed was _cold_.

“Give Cream a kiss for me,” she said with a smile.

“I will fucking not,” he said, as he grabbed Heartsbane—just in case—and ducked out into the snowy waste of the North in Winter.

She allowed herself a moment more of decadence and then she, too, roused herself for the morning's work. She dressed fully for her chores, not least because of the icy chill that made her toes and fingers and nose and earlobes burn.

More wood on the fire, stir the coals.

Snow for their water jug, snow for their cleaning pail.

Breakfast would be pickled eggs and dried salted fish. They were out of bread, cheese and anything sweet. The rest of the day would be salt-preserved radish and carrot, and dried mushrooms. The mushrooms could make a tolerable soup for supper so she found a pot with a lid, filled that with snow too, and added the dried mushrooms and a shaving of cubed salt she’d found in the otherwise empty larder.

She set out the food, and two dented tin plates from the larder, and the one fork she’d brought from Winterfell. She’d told Mora in the kitchens that she wanted to pack some food for valued soldiers who were going out on patrol and then thrown herself completely on Mora's mercy. If there was a next time she would do things differently, but no point in dwelling on it.

She made the bed out of sheer habit, even though she knew it would likely be mussed again in short order.

She was trying to get her tangled hair to cooperate with an elaborate braid when he returned. His lips were white, no blue. Must warm them, she thought.

"How are they doing?" she asked, worried.

“They’re fine but we’re out of food for them by tomorrow. Might be able to stretch it one more day if we _had_ to, but I don’t like it,” he said, frowning.

“Then we’ll go home tomorrow morning,” she said.

“It’s still damn cold but the snow stopped and I think there might be sun out after this wind,” he said, nodding. “Tomorrow morning, then.”

They looked at each other then, regret and a sort of peaceful gratitude combined in their expressions.

“Eat with me?” she asked. His eyebrow arched.

“ _With_ me. Just with. For now,” she said. She wanted to repress her smile but it just kept finding her lips and cheeks and taking over.

He flipped his chair around and sat on it backward, pulled close to the table. She suspected that was easier than balancing his weight on the rickety thing in the regular position. She wasn’t sure the cabin's very old and rickety chairs were sturdy enough not collapse under _her_ weight.

There was a long silence. They’d gotten a little better at talking to each other when they were in bed, but sitting across from each other like this felt formal...awkward.

“Do you want to talk about the weather?” he offered, teasing.

“It’s cold,” Sansa said, gesturing outside.

“I didn’t fucking appreciate how warm it was in Winterfell until we got out here,” said Sandor, pulling his cloak tighter around him. She saw that he only had leather riding gloves and those were ripped along several seams. Wherever they’d come from, they were too small. Suede gloves, lined with rabbit fur, and a new pair of black leather riding gloves, both the right size for his big hands. She would do that first when she got back to Winterfell.

Given a chance, frostbite would take his fingers and eat them down to nubs. She smiled a secret smile, glad that she might of some little use to him, after all he had done for them.

“What?” he asked, stuffing the last pickled egg in his mouth.

“Nothing,” she replied.

“Why are you smiling?” he asked again.

“If I wanted you to know, I would have told you,” she said, defensive.

Then she realized she had a bone to throw him that might work as a distraction: “Winterfell is warm because it’s built over hot springs. They’re deep below the castle, locked away. But guess who has the keys to everything? If I’m still Lady of Winterfell, and not confined to my rooms when we go back, maybe I’ll take you down there sometime. I think the heat would do wonders for the leg,” she said.

“He wouldn’t lock _you_ up!” said Sandor, suddenly alarmed.

“I don’t think so either, but Daena, Elaena and Rhaena were put in the Maidenvault for no reason at all, so who can say?”

Sandor looked miserable, desperate, wild: “Let’s go then. Now. Fuck if I know where but let’s just go.”

“I would. And I will, if it comes to that. But Jon deserves...a chance to understand. He’s been so good to me. Far better than I deserved. I’d still be running from Ramsay if it weren’t for him. He’s my family. There’s so few of us left. I can’t just—bolt. If nothing else, it's what Cersei wants, to split us up so she can hunt us down one by one,” she said, feeling desperate and wild herself.

“I knew this was a bad idea. I knew it. You just had—I never should have come North. Why did I let Beric—fuck. _Fuck._ Bird, I don’t know what to do,” he said, a little frantic.

His statement "Bird, I don’t know what to do" broke her heart a little because she still believed in some childish way that the Hound knew how to solve everything, how make everything right. To her mind he was so absolutely capable that everything was possible only with him at her side.

“Don’t worry. We are going to be fine, so long as we stay together. Like you said. I won’t leave and you won’t leave, and they aren’t strong enough to keep us apart, are they?” she said, knowing without doubt that was true, but unsure if she could make _him_ believe it.

Somehow the emotional pain she felt at _his_ distress appeared within her body. She ached for him. Two aches, really. One ache, a delicious pain where he’d gnawed on her flesh, that reminded her all of that they’d done so far, and another one, warmer, softer, calling her to act.

“Weren’t you supposed to be the King’s bride last time I saw you? How are you attached to a completely different King all these years later? His fucking _sister_? I bet this is one of the ways the gods are punishing me for all the things I’ve done,” he continued, bellyaching while eyeing her resentfully.

“I’m hungry again,” she said, pointedly looking at him instead of the remaining food on the table. She soaked in his lips, his beard, his shoulders, his arms down his hands, where they rested on his thighs.

“Guess we better put something in your mouth, little bird,” he chuckled, his mood suddenly lighter.

“Turn around in that chair,” she suggested. She knelt before him, her hair a crown of fire around her head, her gown spread around her in a coil of luxurious, now-soiled fabric.

He did as he was told, and she thought he looked a little frightened of her. “Are we absolutely fucking sure this isn’t one of the dreams?” he asked.

“I’m sure,” she said as she unlaced his breeches.

“You know they’ll call you the Hound’s bitch and worse, don’t you?” he warned, leaning down to her to stroke her cheekbones with his thumbs.

“Well, that doesn’t sound pretty, but that’s honest--and  _true_. I’d  _much_ prefer to be called that than King Joffrey’s bride, or Lady Lannister, or mother of Ramsay Bolton’s children. And in case, I have so much work to do, I don’t have time to listen to the gossip of tavern wenches or unkind courtiers. Let them talk. We’ll do our work, and live our lives, and they’ll come to see us for who we really are,” she promised.

“Sansa Stark, where did you come from?” he said, marveling at her.

“The north,” she shrugged with a smile. He looked at her again, shaking his head, inviting her to change her mind.

“I want to do it. It makes you feel good, doesn’t it? I want you to feel good when you’re with me--and only me--and whatever it takes, I’ll do,” she said, grasp his stiffening length in both hands, stroking firmly.

“You’re a brave woman, I’ll give you that,” he said, with a hitch in his breath.

“Tell me if I hurt you? Or if I don’t do it right? I’m a slow learner, but I do learn,” she said, as she leaned in close to his cock. She let his cock bump into her cheek as she approached it, inhaled the musky masculine scent of him.

As she took his thick cock whole into her mouth, she looked up him, staring into his eyes, as she sucked and tongued the head. She willed him to see in her eyes that she worshipped everything about him: his huge heart and his huge cock and _...everything_ , from the scars at the crown of his head to the curling black hairs on his big toes. She took as much of him as she could, down to the back of her throat, but she had no chance of containing the whole thing in her little mouth. She grabbed the root of him with one hand and his balls with another, and she massaged with her hands while she licked him with her tongue and hummed as she sucked.

He held back as long as he could, but finally leaned forward to grab a fistful of her hair and urge her deeper. He fucked her mouth, rough and quick, and when he grabbed the seat of the wooden chair with his free hand as he came, she feared for the future of the chair. “ _Fuuuuccck_ , Sansa. Fuck. Seven hells. Fuck,” he panted as she milked all of his seed out of his cock and into her throat.

She felt like a proper wanton when she wiped a drop or two of his salty, white fluid off her lips with the back of her hand.

He was still for a long time as he recovered. She rested her head on the inside of his thigh, hands in her lap, while he came back to himself.

“You know,” he said, “You’re everything I ever wanted,” looking into her eyes as he offered her a hand off the floor. When she was standing again, he took both of her hands in his and held them tight.

“You will be fucking cherished every damn day you’re with me,” he said.

She smiled radiantly then, because she saw that he was beginning, just a little, to trust her with his heart. She was certain they were going to be absurdly happy together if they could survive the Great War.

“Pull here,” she said, pointing to the laces that held her gown fast to her body. He did, and the dress came apart, and he unwrapped her then, palming her every visible curve as he nudged the dress off her shoulder with his lips. And then he reached low on her body, cupping her ass and squeezing, gently. He fisted the back of her shift then, and pulled it up her body to waist height. He smiled into her collarbone as he felt her bare skin on his hand. The chill was everywhere around her—goosebumps on goosebumps, except for the places on her body where she was being touched by his massive hands.

She shivered hard, then, so he kissed her neck one more time and then pulled her shift up over her head, and then lifted her up to carry her to the bed like a proper bride. She threw her arm around his neck and clung to a handful of his cloak.

He threw her in the bed and ordered: “Get under the covers now, little bird. Anyone who sucks my cock like that is too special to die young of consumption.”

“Sandor!” she gasped, shocked again despite all the shocking things she’d already done since they’d been in the gamekeeper’s hut.

He ignored her and busied himself with shucking off his own clothes. As he crawled back into bed, she thought again of the hot springs under Winterfell, or the warm springs in the godswood, or even just a hot bath in the Lord’s Chamber, and send a wish into the world that they might get to experience any one of those, together.

They huddled together under the furs for warm, petting each other slowly and easily, after two days finally a little less desperate, a little less crazed with lust above all else. She found herself enamored of the skin of his lower abdomen, the V-shape where his trunk met his legs. She ran her fingers over it again and again, humming softly to herself and thinking of their future together.

He was equally consumed with the curve of her behind, stroking it ceaselessly, except when he let his hand run all the way up her side.

At one point, she crawled on top of him, reached down for his huge arm and tried to score his bicep with her nails. “Hey, that’s my sword arm. Keep your claws to yourself, wolf,” he protested.

She whispered into his bad ear, “But how will the kitchen wenches and the whores in the Winter Town know that you’re mine? I want them to know. I want them to know that I have claws and that I _will_ use them.”

“You think I would swallow dirty bathwater when I could drink red wine? You don’t know me at all, do you?” he chastised. “If you need a mark, take the leg and call it yours. The truth is that I was always trying to get back to you. At first I thought I’d get to the red brother and fight in his army. Maybe if he won his war we’d get you out of King’s Landing and I could see you again. That plan died at the Twins. And then I found Arya and all I could think was that maybe the reason I lost my Northern princess was because the little wolf needed me more—maybe the gods wanted me to take the long way—and then after the Eyrie, there was nowhere to take her, no way to find you, and I didn't know what to do. And then I fucking lost her too, because I was a bloody fool. So say this scar here on my leg belongs to you. I failed, bird. But I won't fail you again. I won't.”

“I believe it,” she said, grave. In her heart she still wasn’t sure that anyone could protect her, or that there was anything such a safety, but she adored him for promising just the same. His good intentions and sincere failures were more precious to her than tens of thousands of words--so many _lies_ \--from any other man.

She dropped off him then, creating a burrow for herself between one of those huge arms and the even broader chest, and then backed into him so her behind was against his crotch. He pulled her close with one huge hand splayed over her belly.

“Will you help me decide which of Stranger’s bastards to keep and which to sell? The first one is coming soon,” she asked, with a little yawn after _decide_.

“Do horses really have bastards?” he wondered.

“You know what I mean,” she said.

“Yes, I’ll help you, little bird. I doubt most of the babies will survive the winter—they’ll be so little, it’s too cold—but I’ll help you decide,” he agreed.

“I want to knit you a blanket, but first I have to do the gloves and the cloak,” she mumbled, almost to herself.

He stilled for a minute, behind her, and then: “You don’t have to do any of that either, but I suppose you’ll say you want to take care of me or some shit."

A great heaviness had come over her eyelids so she didn’t reply, but he whispered to the top of her head, “I know you’re the Lady of Winterfell and don’t need a damn thing, but I want to take care of you, too.”

She grunted.

He continued, “I’ve seen the whereabouts of the Night King twice now in fire visions. I think Beric’s asshole Red God might be talking to me. The past two times the Night King was nearby were...clusterfucks, but if I find him again, maybe I’ll kill him for you, so you can have peace, and get your castle back in order.”

She nodded against his arm and mumbled _mmmm-hmmm._

***

When she awoke, he was still beside her. The fire was stronger than she would have thought. Had he added more logs by himself? Must have. Their discarded clothes had been collected into a mixed pile and set atop the chest at the foot of the bed. She liked seeing their things commingled, _together_. He was hard again. She felt his member jump against her as she roused.

She smiled at the feel of him. “Oh good, I was worried you were getting bored with me,” she said.

“No, not yet,” he smirked, reaching around her to cup her breasts in his hands, weigh them and brush over the nipples with his calloused, scar-roughed hands. She gasped and pushed closer into his grasp. He repeated the action again and again, and sometimes found a nipple and pulled it between the sides of his index finger and middle finger. She felt herself growing wetter and finally dipped her own fingers between her legs. She settled into the familiar actions that had been her only release for years and years. She dipped a finger, no two, inside herself, shallowly at first and then deeply, and drew them out slowly pulling them back to her nub. She mewled and arched her back in response to the sensation, and then flicking the nub with her fingertip and every so often adding a long slow stroke around that place with her two wet fingers, sometimes even grinding on the heel of her hand. He pulled his other arm out from under her and used it to stroke her back in long smooth movements and then tickle the underside of her buttocks, just above where they met her legs and so close, so close to her woman’s place. She flicked and stroked, frigging herself faster and faster, her sounds of pleasure filling the little room and then finally, just as she was approaching her peak, he slipped two fingers between her legs and up into her and she exploded with the shock and thrill of his long hot fingers inside her cunt.

As she came down from her high, he replaced his fingers with his cock and drilled into her. She felt like she was going to be fucked into the wall, so she braced herself on the headboard with stiff arms so she could push back against his thrusts. He kneaded her ass now and again and gently spanked her creamy round cheeks as he rammed into her, so deep that felt him strike the entrance to her womb and she embraced that brief sharp pain as a gift, proof of their closeness. Every stroke, fast fast fast, was marked by a gasping squeal from her, and she was so full of him and her lips and her clit were so swollen with blood and a low warm pleasure, her breasts bouncing and his balls slapping her nub. Then, with a roar and a final massive thrust, he came inside her. She smiled, half relieved that it was over and half wishing that it had gone on and on. He collapsed on top of her and folded her arms in close to her sides and clasped hands in his. They were still connected down there, with him crushing her into the mattress, breath intermingled as they caught lungfuls of air and tried to recover themselves.

“You’re extraordinary, girl, I hope you know that,” he said, nibbling on her earlobe before pulling out and rolling off her.

“If you say so,” she said, still blinking away the happy, satisfied feeling that sat—no, sang—in every nerve.

“I say so,” he said, hoisting himself up to find another rag to clean them with. They were running low on those, too. They’d have to start using pieces of clothing soon—maybe her shift—or wash what they had without soap and see if it dried in front of the fire fast enough to be of use.

“How long did I sleep?” she asked.

“A long time. The moon’s up now. I got to watch you dream. And I discovered _you_ have a pretty little scar above your lip,” he said.

“Ha, yes. I slipped in the washtub when I was little and split it,” she agreed, fingering the tiny hairline crack above her lip. “Oh, I never tried to warm up the mushroom broth. We can drink it cold--unless it’s frozen solid. Hey, when we get home, will you come down to the crypts with me and light candles for everyone? I mean, I’ll light the candles, but I want them to be able to see you: Father and Rickon, and Aunt Lyanna, and all the ancestors,” she asked, suddenly pleading.

“Girl, I held your father’s head up for the crowd the day he was beheaded. His ghost doesn’t want to see me, and he definitely doesn’t want to know I'm fucking his daughter,” said Sandor, looking angry but also tugging on his beard in a way she hadn’t seen before.

She’d call it nerves in another man--could he really be abashed at the idea of facing her very dead father?

“You’re wrong. If any of those people are truly watching us, they already know who you are and what you’ve done. The only reason House Stark endures at _all_ is because you saved my life and Arya’s, so many times. No one looked out for us but you. We were alone. Tyrion spoke for me, but only you fought for me. You fought for Arya, too. Wherever she is, I think my mother lights a candle for _you_ ,” she said, willing him to believe it, to believe in himself as much as she did.

“Bullshit,” he scoffed. Deflection was a habit, she could see, but she also saw he liked her words. Wanted to believe them.

“Truth,” she promised. “Kiss me, please.”

She could taste this man forever.

She loved the way he plunged his tongue into her mouth, and she rejoiced in sucking on his bottom lip.

She loved looping her arms around his neck to hold him to--

He froze, pulling away from her lips.

“Fuck,” he snarled, rolling away from her.

All her insecurities flared at once. Was she doing this poorly? Exactly how bad did she smell? He saw that and took her hand to reassure her, holding it to his lips.

“They’re here,” he said, apologizing with his eyes.

“Are you sure?” she asked.

They both stilled and listened.

She heard nothing, but after he tilted his head for a moment, he nodded and said, “Yes. And I think they’ve already got the horses.”

Sansa immediately jumped up from the bed, once again a great lady with a commanding mien.

“Put on your breeches. Whoever it is, let me handle this. _Please_ try not to say anything inflammatory,” she warned.

He did as he was told, but purposefully sat back down on the side of the wooden chest, right next to where Heartsbane leaned at the end of the bed. She could feel him flare, saw the tension in his hands. He wanted to be holding a blade.

She pulled the bearskin off the top of the bed, and clutched it in front of her with one hand. Sandor, behind her, would be be getting one last eyeful before their time here was over.

She opened the door, and sure as he had said, Brienne of Tarth and Podrick Payne were crouched just in front the porch of the hut, swords drawn. A score of other men in Stark armor were arrayed around the hut, and all of them had their swords drawn.

Facing the chill outside was like a slap in the face, compared to the warmth of the room behind her. Her nipples hardened and she got goosebumps, and she thought it was a pity that Sandor couldn’t see that from his position at her back.

She leaned against the doorjamb, casually, so anyone who cared to look could see in the cabin. She hoped they all took in the fire in the hearth, the plates on the table, the rags drying on a clothesline, her gown and stockings piled atop his jacket and tunic on the chest the foot of the bed, their shoes waiting by the door, and above all, the huge half-naked man leaning one strong arm on the footboard of the bed.

“Lady Brienne,” she began, chipper as anything. “What an unexpected surprise. We didn't know you were coming.”

Brienne gaped, looking back and forth between Sansa and Sandor. She opened and closed her mouth a couple of times like a fish underwater.

She finally managed, “We’ve been looking for you.”

“Didn’t I leave a note that I was going away but that everything was fine? I swore I left a note, but of course, sometimes such things are lost. Well, at least the gate guards surely told you that I was with the Hound, and I’ll assume Arya assured you that no harm would come to me in his company,” she continued. She wasn’t feeling as nonchalant as her words suggested, but it was the best she could manage under the circumstances.

“We were...worried,” continued Brienne, still on her guard.

“Yes, I can see that,” said Sansa, suddenly angry about all the swords in front of her. The men were, to a one, bug-eyed at the sight of the half-naked harlot in front of them.

She hoped the light from the fire behind her made her tangle of sex-tousled hair all the more memorable. _Tell them what you saw here. Tell everyone._

“How about an agreement between two ladies, then?" offered Sansa. "We’ll come, without any trouble, if you agree that no harm comes to him while we're in your custody and that we won’t be separated until we reach Winterfell—and I keep Heartsbane with me,” she offered. She heard him stand up and the quiet clink of Heartsbane with him. She felt him behind her, his bulk shadowing the doorway.

Brienne’s eyes widened and she looked away from the sight of half-naked Sandor standing so close behind Sansa, with not a complete outfit between them.

She saw Pod swallow. _Yes, think about how many of you he can cut through if you try to take us out of here by force._

“Very well,” said Brienne. “You have my word.”

“And you have mine,” agreed Sansa. “We’ll be out in a moment. Pod, please ready the horses, if you will.”

Pod did as he was bid.

Sansa closed the door on her so-called rescuers, and tried not to growl in frustration. They dressed in silence. Sansa thought her boots felt especially confining after she’d gone such a long stretch without them. He packed up what remained of the food, put the tin plates in the bucket of wash water, hastily threw the bedspread and the furs over the stained, wrinkled sheet.

She put out the fire and imagined the men outside would see the light in the cabin go out through the round window, green fading to black.

He slung the saddlebags over his shoulders, and she slung Heartsbane over her back—gods, it was long and heavy.

He unfastened the dragonglass dagger from his sword belt and pointed it at her. “If you have to use this, hold it tight and push fucking hard. Harder than you think you have to,” he instructed, and then leaned down tie it to her calf with the leather straps. She held his sword belt with the rest of its knives awkwardly in her arms, and remembered Shae, long ago in King’s Landing. She had worn a needle-thin blade tied to her calf, just so.

Sandor ran his hand up Sansa’s leg one last time in the darkness, and placed a kiss up high on her thigh, near where she’d asked him to mark her.

They both took deep breaths and opened the door that led back to the North, back to Winterfell and the name Stark, back to Jon and Arya and Bran and the Northern lords and her responsibilities.

 _Choices have consequences_ , she thought. _We made our choices, time to face the consequences._


	4. Winterfell

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sandor POV. 
> 
> Sandor Clegane is a glass case of emotion and mixed feelings and confusion. The fact that he's a childhood trauma survivor comes up here. The soundtrack to this chapter is [Adele's "Water Under the Bridge"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BBvHRB5vQE) on repeat, so that vibe definitely contributed to his mood swings and anxieties.
> 
> Dirty thoughts and lots of swears, but no actual smut in this one. Will try to get some of that in the next installment. ;)

Sansa. Sansa. Sansa. He sat in the dungeon at Winterfell turning her name over and over in his mind, every turn bringing with it another picture from their time together in that little abandoned cottage.

_“Give Cream a kiss for me.”_

_How it felt to push into her._

_Her lovely, quick fingers tangled in her hair as she braided it._

Sansa.

_The way her legs dropped open so easily when he touched her._

_Her bare back exposed to him, the line of her spine and the moving edges of her shoulder blades as she braced herself against him._

_“I want to knit you a blanket.”_

_“A couple of horses...the Hunter’s gate...midnight.”_

Fuck. Sansa.

The Starks didn’t seem like the type to torture him before the beheading.

He could maybe appreciate waiting for the end here, knowing that this place _was_ her.

The stones at his back were cold and hard, and Sansa, his bird, was so warm and soft, but this was her place and he could feel her everywhere around him. Better appreciate what he had than dwell on her absurd dreams for the future. Babies. Him and her and the little wolf and _pups_ as some kind of... _family_.

Sansa.

_Sansa in a silky, loose-fitting green gown, one side dropped off her shoulder, swell of her breast exposed to him, nursing a baby girl with dark red hair._

She’d caught him and told him she wanted to run away with him, like he’d wanted to run away with her all those years ago. She said no back then. He should have said no now, if only for her sake, but in the end he didn’t have the guts to refuse her.

He wanted her too—he’d been haunted by his desire for her for so fucking long.

She said she’d understand, but all he could think of was how bereft, how lonely she would look—feel—if he didn’t come. He’d never be able to face her again.

He could hardly face her now, but at least sometimes he dared to watch her across the Great Hall, and he could still look her in the eye when she gave him Valyrian steel, _for fuck’s sake_. He could still face her when it might be the last time he’d ever see her. He just wanted to memorize her face and see the tortured, searching way she looked at him now. Just one last look before he might be done. That wasn’t too much to ask, was it?

He especially liked watching her talk at the high table with the black brother. With him, she was at ease. Smiling. He’d talk for a long time and then listen and consider what she said. She’d ask him something with a furrowed brow and he’d answer her and the clouds would clear from her eyes.

Sansa. Sansa. Sansa. He made a point never to speak her name if he could possibly avoid it. She was sacred. That name was sacred. He always had the strangest feeling that if he said her name it would steal something from her.

Now that he knew she was a fucking witch, that sounded even more true.

He should have asked her more about that. What exactly was it that she thought she did? Arya said that the crippled brother was some sort of...seer? Green dreams? Something about that tree with the face and the red leaves?

Maybe they were _all_ magical?

Arya didn’t seem magical, just fierce, but one night when they were in the Riverlands, Arya had started screaming in her sleep so loud and long that he’d had to smother her screams with his hand lest she invite unwanted attention. Hell if he wanted to fight an unknown number of marauders in the dark.

She’d fought him like a shadowcat but when she finally settled down (“It’s just me, girl. Stop biting!”) she looked at him with big sad little girl eyes and said, “My wolf was in a fight. They were attacking me, her—Nymeria.”

“What’s the fuck’s a Nymeria?” he asked, vaguely recalling the name as something like Aegon or Maegor—one of those names from history—but unsure what it had to do with the little lost pup before him.

“She’s my dire wolf. We all had wolves once. I am my wolf, and my wolf is me,” she said, sadly, before lying back down again with that empty look she carried around with her as faithfully as she carried her Needle.

He remembered seeing the both of them setting off down Kingsroad with their dogs—dire wolves?—and then as soon as anything, they were gone. Sansa’s sentenced to die by King Robert, Arya’s driven back into the wild.

 _The dire wolves, in company with a murderous peasant boy, attacked our prince. The good prince must be avenged._ Sansa’s wolf would have been killed by the Lannisters sooner or later, in any case—they wouldn’t abide their precious hostage having a guard dog. They needed to keep her at their mercy, meager though that mercy was.

So, Arya was her wolf, and her wolf, wherever she was in the wilderness, was Arya. That seemed true enough. Sansa was something different, though, and her wolf—pretty little thing like her, he vaguely recalled—was long dead.

So, Arya had wolf dreams, and Sansa dreamed of...him? A dog’s not so far from a wolf.

Clever girl. She’d improvised.

He thought of all the times he’d heard her voice in his head, unbidden. Crying, grieving, screaming.

He thought of how he knew the mob had her the day of the riot and he could just _see_ where she was and how to get to her.

He remembered how she felt that day in the throne room and how he _felt_ her humiliation and shame and confusion and _fear_ , so that he wanted to kill them all or drop to his knees beside her and be sick.

He thought about how he could feel her rising terror at the idea of being captured and torn apart by Stannis’ soldiers on the night the Blackwater burned. _The lady’s starting to panic_. She’d been with him, _inside_ him, all along, hadn’t she?

The nights were the worst. He drank so much back in those days so that he couldn’t dream anymore, just slept a dangerous deep sleep with no dreams.

Drink until no dreams. Just oblivion. Because when he stayed sober, his dreams were almost nothing but her.

She was a fucking child and yet he dreamed of her every night, kissing him, touching him, underneath him while he fucked her gently or fucked her hard. Touching him—touching his scars, touching his chest, touching his cock. Smiling at him like he was worth something.

He dreamed of her being broken like a doll by Gregor. He dreamed of Joffrey holding her by the throat while she scratched at him; she sobbed and screamed in pain, and the door was barred, and he couldn’t break it down and he just stood and listened to her agony. He dreamed that Cersei took her head and that he was the one who held it up for the crowd in their frenzy. He dreamed of her blood always, almost more than he dreamed of her alive and loving him.

Slit throat.

Beaten to death, teeth knocked out, eyeball missing, blood pouring from her nose and her ears.

Knife in the heart, dead on the floor, stain across the rug.

He dreamed of her terror at her first flowering. He dreamed of taking her maidenhead and seeing her blood on his cock. Sometimes she said, “I’m so glad it was you,” and sometimes she tried to get away from him and he held her down with his hands and his knees and his weight, and when he was done she crawled into a corner, naked, huge tears falling from her eyes but making not a sound.

Every so often he dreamed her dead in a bed so drenched with blood that it dripped down to the floor in a curtain of red, and a tiny dead baby between her legs, the baby white because it had no heartbeat, and her skin paling because now she didn’t either.

And the fucking singing.

On nights when the gods felt kind, he got singing and pretty pictures instead of violent death and the sickening idea that he ought to fuck—rape if it she wouldn't come willingly—that helpless scared girl.

On the good nights he saw Winterfell and Clegane Keep and Casterly Rock and the Red Keep and Maegor’s Holdfast. He saw trees and wolves and black hounds and storm clouds full of snow and horses. Birds. Always birds. Birds, colored and dun and black. Faces, too. Some he knew, some he didn’t. And over it all, she sang.

He would bet his sword arm that it was her voice. Always. She had a lovely clear voice, melodic, unwavering. It was a girl’s voice, to be sure, but strong in its way.

She sang to him, and when it was “Six Maids in a Pool” he would wake up and be overwhelmed with sadness and self-pity. Tears fell from his eyes on those mornings, and he was ashamed, and he looked to be sure that his door was double-barred, so that no one of his fellow Kingsguard might burst in on him and see his pathetic, groveling... _grief_.

If he fell asleep now, here in the Winterfell dungeon, would she come to him? Did she have to be asleep too? He thought maybe not. Would he get a glimpse of what she’d shown him over their days in the cabin—hell, since he’d been back in Winterfell? That impossible, extraordinary devotion. That...trust?

He rested his head in his hands, willing sleep to come. He ought to be tired after a day of fucking and fighting—Walkers had set upon them on the road; he’d killed six to Brienne’s two and felt entirely smug about that. Then that fucking wolf pack came to look down upon them and Stranger and Cream had both been terrified, and Sansa was so happy and joyful to see them even while he was trying to get her fucking horse from bolting out under her.

“They’re here to welcome you,” she chirped. _I don’t care_ , he thought, _your horse isn’t a wolf, it’s a horse, and you’re going to get thrown, stupid girl._ Even her little white had about pulled his arm out of its socket.

Voices. Outside and down the hall. One authoritative, firm. Two anxious, rushed, fearful. The dungeon guards and someone else.

Seven hells. Here we go.

The door creaked open. He got to his feet. What’s this going to be, then?

“Hound, are you in there?”

Just Arya. Could be worse.

“Down here, girl.”

He saw torchlight reflecting off the walls, and heard footsteps and then his wolf girl was there. He felt himself flinch at the torch, partly because of the flame but mostly because the sudden brightness shocked his eyes.

“Why are you here?” he asked, in a way that he hoped wouldn’t encourage her.

“Sansa sent a maid to find _me_ and then she told me to find _you_ down here and I was to feed you and make sure no one was tormenting you, so here I am,” said Arya.

“So here you are,” he answered as she slotted the torch into the holder on the wall. She jammed a bag through the bars. Something that smelled like venison. Ribs. Nice.

“What did you do to my sister?” asked Arya, because that was the question of the hour, wasn’t it?

“None of your business. Go away,” he said.

_I liked it better when I thought they were both dead. Didn’t have to worry about them anymore, and definitely didn’t have to explain myself._

The ribs were good; elk venison, with some exotic spice on the crispy parts.

“How did she look?” he asked.

“Sansa? She _looked_ like a cat that had got into the cream. She refuses to see Jon until after she’s cleaned up. She was in the tub when I saw her. Humming and smiling like an idiot. You’re getting the worse end of the deal, Hound.”

_She looked like a cat that had got into the cream._

“What’s it to you what deal I’m getting?” he asked.

“It’s nothing to me,” said Arya. She slid down the wall then to sit on the stone floor of the hallway outside his cell.

“I told Jon what I could about it, but I don’t know everything. Bran just kept saying he couldn’t tell where you two were because ‘It wasn’t time yet.’ I think this is the first time Jon has understood that Bran’s dead and what lives in his body isn’t really...well, he’s not a Stark, that’s for sure. Not anymore,” said Arya, stuffing her hands under her armpits for added warmth.

“What did you tell your brother...about...it?” he asked, dreading the answer. _Your pretty sister. I should have taken her that night the Blackwater burned. I should have fucked her bloody—at least I’d have one happy memory._

“I told him that you two have some strange fascination with each other. That you saved her life at least twice in King’s Landing. I told him that when I first told _her_ that _we’d_ been traveling companions, she nearly lost her mind. I think she asked me questions about you all day for three days straight before she finally settled down. She made tell everything I remembered you ever said or did about seven times, just over and over again. She got out a map and made me point to every place I could remember we’d gone,” said Arya.

“She got out a map?” he marveled.

“She still keeps it rolled up in her secretary and I swear I’ve walked in on her looking at it,” said Arya.

_She was looking for me._

“So what did you do to my sister?” said Arya.

“I’m not going to talk to you about _any_ of that, so leave it be. I’m fed. You’re done,” he said, allowing himself to be a little angry that no one understood that what they had, he and Sansa, it was in _both_ of them. It was _between_ the two of them—and it was nobody else’s fucking business anyway. They were two parts of something, certainly now, if not always. But no one would believe if he tried to explain, not that either one of them owed any of these people any explanation at all.

“I hope she gets pregnant,” said Arya.

“What the fuck?” he said. He wasn’t sure if he was more shocked by the wish or by the girl’s certainty about what had gone on during the days when her sister was missing. How did she know anything about all that?

“Jon’s apparently a true-born son of House Targaryen, which is...wild, but he grew up a bastard. He _hated_ it. If she’s pregnant he’ll force you to marry her at sword point for sure,“ she continued.

“Fuck,” he grunted.

He couldn’t marry her. It wasn’t that he didn’t want such a thing. He did want to marry her—if only so she wouldn’t be married off to someone else—but the truth was that he wasn’t sure he would be able to fight right if he wasn’t fighting with all the rage that he carried with him about Gregor and fire and all of Tywin Lannister’s children and dead farm girls and dead sisters and Littlefinger and dead Ned Stark and Arya dead in a ditch somewhere and Sansa lost to the wind and, especially, Joffrey abusing that beautiful girl. _If I had a girl like that, I’d be so good to her. She’s a queen. Joffrey, you evil awful stupid fool._ A world where Sansa Stark warmed his bed and handed him Valyrian steel swords and Arya followed him around so she was always in arm’s reach whether he liked it or not, so he knew— _knew_ —that she was all right? That was fucking unrecognizable to him as a possible reality.

If he started to believe in some fool dream like that, he’d go soft, he was sure if it, and then he’d be of no use to them at all.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

“Everybody knows, you know," she said. "I mean, they don’t _know_ but everyone talks about the looks you two give each other. Do you guys know that sometimes you two stop short when you cross paths with each other and then stand stock still for about a full minute? And that scene between the two of you with Heartsbane was _not_ subtle. I think I saw three different men trying to hide their hard-ons and—"

“What in all seven hells do you know about hard-ons?” he wanted to know. Who’d been talking to her or, worse, showing her things?

“Oh, I’m quite worldly these days. Furthermore, any time she’s not staring at you, you’re staring at her,” continued Arya, curling her legs under her. She was going to be a little ball of frost-covered fluff soon. You could roll her up and push her down a hill and she’d pick up snow until she was a giant snowball at the bottom.

“I do _not_ stare at Sansa,” he insisted. He’d made a point of not staring at Sansa. If she was somewhere, he wasn’t there, and if they absolutely had to be in the same place, he was sure to sit somewhere far away from her, ideally in the dark where he couldn’t be seen and he could—watch her from a distance, in peace... _motherfucker_.

“Jon is probably the only person who didn’t notice something was up, because no one told him to look and these days he only has eyes for his dragon queen, the Night King and Cersei Lannister. But the rest of us knew. My personal favorite was when some knight or lord from somewhere would try to impress her or proposition her or something and she would just look for you like ‘save me, get me out of here, I hate this,’ and you’d just pretend you didn’t see anything and flee,” she said.

He couldn’t even deny that one. He wished he could but he couldn’t. He had no claim to her, but he saw all those other fuckers hunting her—he saw the distress on her face, too, and he’d run from it. Run from her. _She’s grown now. She’s strong now. She’s got her black brother and his white wolf and Arya. What’s this got to do with me?_

“So how’d he take it? That news that the Lannister’s dog, last seen in the company of King Joffrey of House His-Parents-Were-Twins, has a ‘strange fascination’ with his little sister, who has already suffered at the hands of shit men enough to fill ten lifetimes?” he asked Arya, feeling more doomed by the moment.

“He got mad. What do you think? Everybody’s always trying to rape Sansa. He was pretty sure it was more of the same. Brienne even said she’d made a mistake trying to save me from you and maybe Sansa was fine, but then she added that she should have killed Littlefinger when she first found him with Sansa, and that got Jon riled up again. Boy, the guards on night duty at the Hunter’s Gate have had a rough couple of days. They just kept saying 'She was smiling and she's the Lady of Winterfell and she wasn't tied up or nothing,' and Jon looked like he wanted to kill them where they stood. Although Bran was definitely the worst. Jon’s so mad at him. He even called him ‘worse than useless,' which is about as irate as Jon gets. Bran wouldn’t say a thing for the whole first day you were gone except, ‘No, I can’t tell you where they are, it’s not time yet,’ ” said Arya.

“Not time yet, what does that even mean? And how would he really know where we were? He can’t read minds, can he?” asked Sandor, feeling unnerved by everything he’d heard about the young man who used to be Brandon Stark.

“He saw it, I guess, because then when Jon said for about the _hundredth_ time that Sansa was in danger and they needed to go find her, Bran suddenly said, ‘It’s done now,’ and he gave Jon and Brienne directions to the gamekeeper’s hut,” said Arya.

_It’s done now? What's done now?_

Arya was shaking now, from the cold. _Hells, child. Don’t stay down here._ He took off his cloak and shoved it through the bars at Arya.

“Put that on, or get the fuck out,” he insisted. She draped it over herself like a blanket and he was satisfied, for now. If she didn’t stop shaking he was going to drive her out of here no matter what.

He sighed.

So it came down to another fucking king. Except this one wasn’t such a cunt, and his sisters worshipped the ground he walked on, and even if Sandor got what he wanted—impossible wishes—he felt that this was all falling to pieces. There was no one to kill. No one to blame. Someone was going to be in terrible pain, and he hoped it was only him, but he feared that whatever he and Sansa had become in that cabin, it wouldn’t last long in the light of day. There was too much against them. She shouldn’t leave her brother, or Winterfell. He wasn’t sure he would be able to survive here—not because of the cold but because he didn’t belong and soon enough whatever tricks the gods were playing on him would be revealed. He knew that in his bones.

Maybe the dreams would continue after he was gone.

Maybe that would be enough.

He thought about how what had once been a kind of torment had evolved into some kind of respite. It wasn’t exactly _peaceful_ —Sansa in his dreams was sometimes improbably wild, an unladylike amalgam of dire wolf and every cheap lay he’d ever had—but it always renewed him, in a way. A night spent with Sansa gave him vigor in the daytime, some kind of sustenance that allowed him survive and fight.

And whereas once the dreams were always anguish and pain and fear and blood, blood, blood, they’d changed slowly over the years into something brighter, more hopeful.

More of her.

And they’d started...they’d starting fucking in the dreams, but not just him doing horrible things to her. She was there too, really there, and she _wanted_ him.

He’d dreamt so many sick dreams of savaging her. He wished so often for the body underneath him in the dreams to be some disposable body, some easily discarded purchased flesh, but it was always Sansa in the end, and he hurt her, or she was disappointed in him, or she simply died in his arms and turned into a stone woman laid to rest in a cold dark crypt.

He blew on his hands to warm them. _These raggedy gloves don’t do shit. I’m a stupid man. I should be warm in Dorne with some warm Dornish whore. Or all the way in Mereen or Qarth. Anywhere warm. The North in Winter. Stupid._

He’d always felt that it was around the time he started North, with the Brotherhood, that there began to be happiness for them in those dreams.

Not all at once, but there would be a bit where he would kiss her and she’d smile. He’d touch her and she’d lean into him. He’d wait for something, somewhere, and _she’d_ appear and be absurdly fucking happy to see him.

He’d be on a horse and come to a gate and she’d be behind it, and when he dismounted she’d throw herself into his arms and try to bloody climb him like a tree.

Sometimes it was even both of them, her and Arya together, and he could barely see them because they were so far away but they were together and safe.

It was a strange day indeed when he realized that when he fucked Sansa Stark in his dreams, it felt like she was there with him, and she was _happy_ about it.

That couldn’t be. She was a child. She was dead. She was married to some cunt. Lost at sea. Lost to him. Gone.

If she had the sense of self-preservation or the sense of self-respect that the gods gave a fucking chipmunk, she hated him or better yet had forgotten he ever lived.

And yet he woke up one morning, breeches sticky from his own release and wishing that he lived somewhere that would allow him to sleep in the nude, all but certain that she had come to him in the night, the real Sansa Stark, because she needed him and she wanted him and together they were stronger than they were apart.

Stronger.

He knew that it was _she_ who had gotten stronger. Yes, he’d gotten healthier too, and burned some of the poison out of his veins during his time with Septon Ray, but it was mostly her growing strong that changed the dreams from largely being the product of his dark, hateful, fearful mind to being a combination of them both.

What made her suddenly so much stronger, maybe happier? He was sure it was Winterfell, after her brother had won it back for her at the Battle of the Bastards. How could he take her away from here? And for that matter how could the black brother tolerate yet another killer defiling his precious sister?

“I don’t think they’re coming tonight. I’m going to bed,” said Arya. “Good luck, old man.” She took off his cloak and pushed it back through the bars to him. “You want the torch?”

He shook his head no. _Leave me to the darkness. I’m used to it. I prefer it. It’s safer in the dark. No fire, and_ _I can’t see what I can’t have. I can’t see what’s coming for me._

And then she was gone.

Dark. Quiet. Sleep? No. Sansa.

He’d been inside her. He’d kissed her. She welcomed him into her body. She smiled at him. Petted him. Wanted him. How had such a thing come to pass?

He wondered if maybe he could hold her hands one more time before they put his head on the block. No. Certainly not. The whole point was that he wasn’t allowed to touch her. Princess of the North. Not for him.

_My beautiful little bird. So very good._

How had the dreams been rendered into such a superior, superlative reality? How had he truly sucked on her neck, nibbled on her nipples, sucked her beautiful pink pussy, smelled her, tasted her, held her, fingered her, fucked her again and again? Putting his hard cock inside Sansa Stark’s wet warmth was pleasure beyond words. The look in her eyes as she took him into her was something beyond pleasure, some sort of gateway to the seven heavens. She welcomed him. Cherished him. He could see it in her beautiful, beautiful eyes. My Sansa’s eyes.

He pictured her asleep in the firelight in the cabin, hands tucked under her chin and a tumble of auburn ringlets around her face.

My Sansa. She’s mine. Mine. Mine. _Mine_.

In his secret heart, he thought that both the Stark girls were his, but his feelings for Sansa had a unique quality of territoriality. _She belongs to me. No king can take her, no other man will survive threatening her, no—_

Voices. Fuck. That was a new voice. Male. And a female too? But not Arya come back?

The door rattled and clanked open. “Sandor?”

No one in the Seven Kingdoms called him that but her. It was going to take some getting used to, but he thought he liked it more than he disliked it.

“Down here,” he called.

“Why didn’t they light the torches? Where is Arya? I told her to come down here,” she said.

“I sent Arya to bed,” he replied. He wasn’t sure if that lie sounded convincing. He wasn’t Arya’s father, how the fuck would he send her to bed.

_Oh good, two torches this time. My favorite part of this dungeon was no fire._

And then she was there, with the black brother, who looked like a thundercloud.

Swirling furs.

He could all but hear the wolf snarl.

His own hackles went up. _Yes, let’s see, boy. I’m much bigger, much stronger, I’m still fast, and she’s fucking_ mine _. Try and take her from me by force. Try._

Out of the corner of eye he saw that Sansa had not appeared before her brother as some stray ragamuffin pulled in from the cold but as a Queen of Winter. Her hair was in that Northern style with the braids and it fell in waves over the bosom displayed by the low-cut neckline of whatever the hell this dress was with the fur trim and the sparkly bits.

Poor King Snow. Didn’t stand a chance against her.

“Hey, wait, are we doing this now? I thought they weren’t coming tonight,” hollered Arya. She was at the entrance to the dungeon cells and yes, that’s just what this needed, more people to argue with each other. He couldn’t even hear her footsteps approaching—had she always been so stealthy?

At least when she joined the fray she was mercifully without a torch. She was carrying a stack of heavy blankets she’d found Seven knows where. They smelled like the good smell of clean, well-washed sheets fresh from a musty linen closet.

She dropped them in a pile outside the door to his cell.

Little wolf. Still kind.

“You can’t behead him in the middle of the night for running off with Sansa! You can’t. He committed no crime. Just banish him, and we’ll all go. You can keep your Targaryen Queen and rule the Seven Kingdoms and appoint Lord Manderly to be Warden of the North. We’ll be in Essos,” said Arya, stomping her feet for perfect childish emphasis.

“I’m not going to behead him _or_ banish him. Sansa already made her case. And Bran says she’s been skinchanging him for years and if anything, she owes him an apology. Taking another human is an abomination,” said His Grace.

Jon Snow couldn’t look any of them in the eye right then. Sansa looked at Sandor though: _Forgive me. I’m so sorry._

All he could think was that he wanted the torches pointing toward the wall rather than the cell. _Away._

The black brother wasn’t done yet. His eyes were burning with barely controlled rage. He turned then, gesturing at Sandor with the torch.

 _No fire_.

“As far as I’m concerned, you _stole_ both of my sisters and  _I don’t know you._ I don’t know why they both talk about you like you’re Aemon the Dragonknight reborn. You may well be, but I wouldn’t know, because you haven’t said one word to me about who you are and what your intentions are toward Sansa and Arya. You slink around Winterfell like a beaten dog and then go out and fight like a man possessed. I am grateful for your service, and my sisters are free people who can— _and do_ , apparently—make their own choices, but don’t presume that you will _ever_ marry my sister under the blessing of the King and Queen. If you want to discuss anything about this, man to man, I’m easy to find. But as far as I know today, _you_ are a dangerous stranger, and I will not give another stranger lordship over my sister, ever again,” said Jon.

Sansa flared: “I have done my duty for this family, Jon. Did you ask for _my_ permission before you bedded Daenerys Targ—“

“You already made that point several times. Thank you, Lady Stark,” he said, cold as his namesake snow.

Sansa turned on Sandor then, half angry and half despairing: “You should have let me push Joffrey off the ramparts and fall with him and just be done with it.”

_What?_

Arya, meanwhile, looked fit to kill.

Yes, there it was: The break with their last brother, the good king. Anger, sadness, resentment, distrust. Fractures in the stone.

 _He’d told her, he wasn’t fit, and no good man in his right mind would let the likes of_ him _keep the company with the likes of her._ _She shouldn’t have to fucking choose and if she did she should choose the brother._ _Throw me back to the dogs where I belong, girl. Stop looking at me like that._

“Can I let him out now?” she asked. Asking for permission? Ever the good girl.

“Do as you please. Please try to not skinchange with any more knights tonight,” said the King.

His Grace left them then, his boots pounding the beat of his anger with every step, the torch retreating into the distance.

Sansa said to her brother’s back, quietly and knowing she wasn't heard, “He’s not a knight.” _No. Not a lord, not a knight, just a dog. Never made anything of himself worth promising to her._

Sansa looked into his eyes, clearly in pain, clearly ashamed, clearly at a loss about how to please her brother and fuck a dog at the same time. She’d had the key to the cell clutched in her hand the whole time. She handed Arya her torch and unlocked the door.

_Stop looking at me like that. I can’t fucking fix it. I don’t know how. I don’t—_

“Go away. Just leave me be _—_ both of you. I’m going to bed _—_ _alone_ ,” he snarled.

He ducked out of the cell, trying to avoid the swaying flame of Arya’s torch near his face, and definitely avoiding looking either of them in the eye.

_Never asked for any of this._

_Don’t need it._

_Don’t want it._

_Leave me be._

He slammed the gate to the dungeon behind him, and considered punching one of the guards for no reason except he wanted to punch something. He stalked off to sleep _alone_ , the way he’d done it almost every night of his damned life.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

_Why is that fucking maester smiling at me like he’s a proud papa? What does he know? Why does he even care?_

_Do maesters even have cocks? Probably not._

_Shit. Of course. He read the raven scroll with which he was entrusted. Dishonest_ bastard _. Not making that mistake again._

_If he told anyone what it says, I’ll rip him open, stem to stern._

_Where the fuck is Sansa?_

Yelling at her and sleeping apart from her had been fucking stupid. Just another stupid, impulsive decision in a lifetime of bad decisions, all fueled by the same shitty feelings of rage and shame.

The great hall was filled to the brim as usual for the morning meal. No Sansa at the high table. No Jon Snow. The dragon queen and the dwarf were off with the dragons fighting another battle in this interminable two-front war in which they found themselves embroiled.

He had somehow ended up at a table with his shadow and a lineup of miscreants including that upjumped swordwhore Bronn, the wildling Tormund Giantsbane, the black brother's brother from Castle Black Samwell Tarly, his wildling woman Gilly and their little yellow-haired kid.

What the hell kind of war were the dragons and the dwarf running anyway? Too many fucking women and children around for his liking.

He slugged back the rest of the mead in his cup and looked around at the rest of the motley soldiers cobbled together by Jon Snow: Northmen, wildlings, Knights of the Vale, Lannister infantrymen and Riverlands irregulars, Dornishmen thirsty for a fight against Cersei, the Brotherhood Without Banners, Dothraki blood riders, Unsullied warriors. _Craziest army I've ever seen._

Two scruffy-looking fellows he didn’t know entered the hall and scanned the assembled legions and when their eyes landed on him they immediately headed in his direction. The hair on the back of his neck stood up, and he palmed a meat knife he snatched off the platter of pork belly. He was wearing Heartsbane and several other blades, but hell if he was going to leave a knife lying out for them to snatch.

_What the fuck is this?_

“Hey, how tall are you?” said the smaller one, a middle-aged, skinny fellow with a dark beard and green homespun vest.

Ah, yes, the novelty of his height.

Best to answer and satisfy their curiosity, and they’d be on their way.

“Six-six,” he said. _Leave me be now. I’m almost done with my bacon and then I’m leaving this room._

“Oh then it can’t be him,” said green vest said to his partner, a ginger with a pot belly.

“Aye, we’re looking for a giant. We’s supposed to rebuild Lady Stark’s bed so she can fuck a giant with room to spare,” said ginger belly.

_Oh no._

Arya whooped beside him.

_I could kill them but it would be messy and Sansa would be mad._

Arya weighed in, as he bloody well knew she would: “Oh you’ve got the right one. This is him.”

“Aha!” exclaimed ginger belly. “Then we won’t even have to trim the beams down. We’ll do it eight by eight, and it’ll be easy.”

“Copper, I told you already, eight by eight won’t fit in the space,” insisted green vest.

“Oh yes it will. I’m very good at eyeballing these things. We can measure to satisfy you, my dear Bosh, but I’m very good at eyeballing these things. Hey, lad _—_ ” said ginger belly, turning back to Sandor.

Sandor stiffened and glared. _I’m not your lad. Also, please leave before I die or kill you, whichever comes first._

“You got giant’s blood in you? Most fellows 'round 'ere that look like you have got giant’s blood in ‘em,” said ginger belly.

“Don’t think so,” answered Sandor, unsure why he was even replying.

“Where you from, son? Maybe this one knows of ice-giant clans from ‘round those parts,” said the one in the green vest, Bosh, pointing toward Tormund. _Not your son. Hardly my father's son._

“The Westerlands,” he answered, still unsure how or why he was enduring this entire nightmare of a conversation.

“Oh,” said green vest.

“Oh, said ginger belly.

Green vest leaned in, conspiratorially, “Around here, maybe better just say you’ve got ice-giant blood, eh?”

And with that he clapped Sandor on the back— _do not fucking touch me_ —and then he clapped ginger belly on the back and then marched off to... _build a bed for him to share with Sansa Stark? What?_

Sandor stabbed the meat knife back into the pork belly.

“Where I come from,” offered Tormund, “you steal a girl and she doesn’t scoop out your eyeballs while you sleep? That’s your wife.”

“That's how Gilly and I got married,” piped in Sam, in a tone that suggested he thought he was being helpful. “I suppose we should do it again before the Old Gods or the New Gods one of these days, but we called it ‘married’ at some point and, really, ever since I helped her escape from Craster’s Keep no one has ever argued differently.”

“I say good on you, you filthy animal, but when I get what’s owed me, we’ll just see who has the prettiest lady, eh?” said Ser Bronn of the Blackwater _._

“Please stop talking,” said Sandor.

He was sure Arya was stirring those eggs around her plate as slowly as humanly possible to drag this out.

_Hurry up. I want to go find your sister and talk to her and kiss her—or possibly fucking strangle her._

And then, in the distance, a horn sounded. And then another. And then a third. Walkers.

Thank the Seven. The bloody fire-breathing dragons were even gone--something about an attack in the south by mutineers from the Golden Company.

He’d never so happy in his life to have an excuse to put on armor and take his sword and go out to try to get killed.

Anything would an improvement on being here with these _people_ talking about the nature of his very young...relationship with the much-too-young-for-him Sansa of fucking House Stark in bloody Winterfell. _Seven hells._


	5. Winterfell 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “The dog was very lonely without his little bird, and the little bird was very scared without her dog.”  
> \--AdultOrphan, “[What Did You Do in the War Daddy](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8769967)"
> 
> This may be my favorite quote in all of SanSan fanfiction. For some reason, it’s so poignant to me. It’s from a bedtime story Sandor is telling their daughter.
> 
> Anyway this final chapter about the bird not being scared anymore and the dog not being lonely anymore, because they're back together. Enjoy.

Lyanna Mormont stood beside the palisade on a slightly raised platform. Her voice was clear and strong; she appeared unperturbed by the quiet choking sobs of the Queen, who stood beside her. The sun was, as it had been for months, invisible behind the sheets of gray cloud cover that was the only sky now.

Darkness encroached minute by minute as the dignitaries paid tribute to the fallen. It would soon be so dark that without a torch you wouldn’t be able to see your hand in front of your face.

“...my cousin Ser Jorah of Bear Island left Westeros in shame and returned with honor. He served our true queen Daenerys Stormborn faithfully and well, accompanying her from the Red Waste to Mereen to Dragonstone itself. He died in battle fighting the Great Other and will be remembered as hero by House Mormont and all of the North. Honored be his name and may the Old Gods guide his spirit into the company of our ancestors in the afterlife.”

And with that the Little Bear lit the funeral pyre that would burn Ser Jorah’s body away from this world and save him from being defiled in death by the Night King.

Daenerys Stormborn would stand and watch, tears in her eyes, until the pyre burned down to ash and bone and nothing more.

Sansa could see the Hound on the edge of the gathering, behind enough other people watching the funeral that he didn’t have to turn away. Good for him, with his fear of fire; less good for her.

She wanted a word, and if he wanted to get away from her, he would likely succeed with the distance she had to cover. This was the first time she’d seen him since he had left her and Arya behind in the dungeon.

Sansa and Sandor had slept apart on their first night back in Winterfell--well, what precious few of hours of night remained after all was said and done--and then the Army of the Dead had launched yet another strike on Winterfell. It was in the effort to drive back the wights that Ser Jorah had fallen. She had whispered thanks to the Warrior and the Old Gods alike when she saw that Sandor Clegane was not among the casualties, but it wasn’t until now that he’d stood still long enough for her to get to him. He’d been occupied with finding and ferrying the wounded inside, reclaiming fallen dragonglass daggers and generally ordering around any younger, greener soldier who cared to take direction.

Sansa stepped down from the platform where she’d stood with the other leaders in Winterfell. He was looking right at her. She started toward him, not sure what he would do if he ducked away from her, as he would have done before they ran off together.

He didn’t duck. Just eyed her with his usual suspicious look.

She thought maybe he took a deep breath before she reached him.

Arya, of course, was standing beside the Hound when she approached. Arya looked at Sansa and then at Sandor and then back at Sansa and then announced, “Well, I’m going to go...hone Needle and the dagger. Maybe do some target practice. I’ll see you two...later?”

Sansa thought she heard a distinct grumble from the direction of her departing sister.

“Will you please help me with something?” Sansa asked Sandor.

“What?” he challenged.

“Will you help me, or should I ask someone else?” she replied.

“No, fuck, fine, what?” he said.

“Follow me. Please,” she said.

She turned away and led him to the kennels at Winterfell. They entered through the main door and were hit with the smells of fresh hay and caged dog. She used a key from a chain around her neck to open the second-to-last pen on the left.

“Can you carry her inside?” asked Sansa. “I need to move her into my room for the foreseeable future.”

“Putting the kennel master's grandson to work with your dogs? Isn’t that a little obvious, even for you?” he said.

“Are you going to help me or not?” she answered, smiling a little. He entered the pen slowly and crouched down close to the black mastiff. The dog looked at the Hound for a moment and stood up to smell his hands. He passed her silent test, because she promptly sat on her haunches and demanded a head-and-jowl scratch. It was granted.

“She’s pregnant,” said Sandor.

“I know, and she’s due very soon, which is why I want her inside. I don’t want the puppies to be out in the cold overnight,” said Sansa.

At that, Sandor gathered up the bitch in his arms and nodded to Sansa to lead him toward her room.

She wondered if he had even been up to the Stark family’s private quarters before. Maybe with Arya? Maybe not? He was properly quartered across the castle in the Guards Hall, near the armory. She led him into the Great Keep and up a staircase, nodding to bystanding guards as she went. Through the hall, and to her room, where another key from around her neck unlocked the door.

She stood back from the door to let him pass through and then followed after him. She noticed he didn’t have to duck to get through the door and she was glad of that.

 _Am I nervous?_ She clenched her hands into fists to keep from wringing them.

He turned to look at her once he was in the room and she pointed to the corner, where she’s made a little nest for Willow and her forthcoming pups. A pair of sheepskins were laid over the stone floor, plus a heavy rag blanket and bowls already full of food and water. “You can just put her down over there, and I’ll see to the rest,” she said.

She made every effort not to look at the new bed frame, although that was a challenge considering it dominated the room.

Willow was deposited on the sheepskins, had her head patted, wagged her tail in return, and then put her head on her paws to lie and wait for her babies.

Sandor stood up then, and she admired again his height and breadth. He seemed huge to begin with, but with the addition of plate armor, mail and then a fur-collared cloak he was even _more_ outsized.

She swallowed. _Not afraid._ But...frozen.

Oh!

“Wait, I need your hands. I almost forgot,” she said. He looked at her like she was mad, and maybe she was. These days she kept all her sewing things in the wardrobe opposite Willow’s bed. She flung open the doors and found the felt she meant to use for the pattern on the top shelf; chalk was in a little cup on the second shelf alongside her needles and thimbles.

He was looking at her with his head cocked. Skeptical. Suspicious. She felt a twinge of pain. She hadn’t realized how long it would be before they trusted each other.

She spread out the felt on the small round table by the window. “Would you put your hands on here? I need to trace them to get the size right. And don’t wiggle. Push down really hard so your hands stay put, otherwise the cut will be wrong.” His eyes narrowed at her, but he approached.

“Oh,” she continued. “Take the old ones off.”

He frowned--his eyes looked so sad, too--and peeled off the old gloves he was wearing, and placed his hands down on the felt.

She leaned over and began tracing. As usual he was positively radiating heat and every time she touched him in the course of her work she felt positively burned. Being this close to him and yet not being close to him was...painful.

And then she was done, and she had no more reason to keep him with her, and she didn’t know what to say. She looked at her feet and then moved to put the chalk back in the cup in the wardrobe and closed the doors, and turned around, half-expecting him to be gone.

He drank her in, head to toe, and then he turned away from her and she closed her eyes and inhaled so she wouldn’t cry. And then she heard the door close-- _don’t whimper, don’t cry, you fool_ \--and then she heard the bolt slide into the lock and her eyes flew open.

“I’m sorry. I’m an ass,” he said, all in one breath.

She wrung her hands then and smiled as much as she dared. “Well, you _had_ been wrongly incarcerated in my ice dungeon. Some frustration seems understandable,” she said.

He crossed the room as swift as anything and crushed her to him. She thought he might be kissing the top of her head, but all she could feel was metal and strength crushing her to him.

“Can you take all this off?” she asked, gesturing haplessly at the armor he had assembled from various sources during the course of the war.

“Help me, lovely squire” he said with a lopsided smile.

She untied his cloak at the neck, like she’d done first thing in the gamekeeper’s hut, and dropped it beside them. He pointed out what seemed like countless buckles. He let assorted pieces clatter to the floor. They landed loudly, which upset Willow, and Sansa thought that Gendry and the other armorers wouldn’t be happy if they had to hammer out dents caused unnecessarily. And then when he emerged from his metal carapace, he repeated the action from moments before, crushing her to him, binding her between a chest and arms that felt like steel themselves. He whispered to the top of her head: “I’m sorry, bird.”

She tipped her head back so she could see his face, and wanted to touch his neck and beard but her arms were too tightly bound by him. “You said that already, and if you want me to say I forgive you, consider it said, but I do understand why you yelled--and bolted. This is all very...fast.”

She wasn’t sure how to describe her persistent feeling of confusion and amazement that her dreams had been rendered real.

“Your brother lives up here, doesn’t he?” said Sandor.

“Yes, and so do Arya and Bran,” she said.

Sandor audibly grumbled, and then looked her right in the eye.

“I’ve missed you,” he volunteered.

“I missed you, too,” she said, smiling into his chest and trying to draw him closer. She was thinking of pulling him to the bed soon.

“No, I mean, I’ve missed you since King’s Landing. I had no claim to you. No right to even think of you, but I felt all along like something was broken that would only be whole again if we were together...That sounds stupid. Never mind. I missed your face. It’s pretty. You’re pretty,” he confessed, all of apiece.

She smiled then and licked her lips. She forcibly extracted herself from his embrace then, and gently shoved him toward the bed. He sat on the edge and watched her make herself useful, arranging the pieces and plates of armor by size and type, and then she took his discarded cloak and hung it on the hooks beside the door. She put two more logs on the fire and enjoyed the burst of sparks that came up as one half-burned log collapsed into the center of the fire under the weight of the new wood.

Darn, was that too much for him? But when she turned to look, he wasn’t looking at the fire. Just at her.

She looked around, wondering if there was anything she’d forgotten. He fidgeted just a little when she wiped her hands on her skirt and started toward him.

She then stepped between his knees and put her arms over his broad, heavy shoulders.

She was only a little taller than him when he was sitting like this, but she liked that she could see his face up close, rather than at tiptoe distance.

She pulled down her hair from where it had been tied into a bun at the nape of her neck, and spread it out with her fingers so that he could see all of it. _This is for you, Sandor Clegane. My hair down like this is only for you._

And then she fell on his mouth, at first just gently reintroducing her lips to his. He hummed out the tiniest little exhale of pleasure. She inhaled the smell of him, and put her hands on either side of his face. She opened her mouth, and he opened his and she wanted to submerge her whole self into him.

He slid his hands around her waist and up her back and pulled her body toward him as he plundered her mouth with his tongue. She tasted his lower lip and the salt of his skin after a battle. She speared his hair with her hands so that she could drink from him the way she wanted. They went on like that for some time, simply kissing, and then she felt him shift and spread his legs further apart and move his hands down to her bottom and knead it roughly.

She felt the familiar warmth and wetness spreading from the place between her legs.

She broke away from him then, and rested her cheek on his and whispered into his ear, “I’m so glad you’re still here. I need you.”

“I’m still here. I’ll be here until the Stranger comes for me,” he told her neck. And then she clutched him to her even tighter. He always spoke so frankly about death and the violence that often precedes it. It hurt every time she heard it, but now she knew that it wasn’t something that she could wish or dream away. Better to look it in the face, and see the truth of it.

She stepped back then, and whispered, “Shall we do it again now?”

“It?” he snorted.

“Yes, _it_ ,” she said with a small smile. She knew he loved saying the crass words for things, but an old shame stung her every time she even thought them, much less said them. Maybe in time she would lose that and gain some of his verbal bravado, or would he borrow from her a more measured manner of speech? Maybe both?

“If you insist, I supposed I could endure it,” he said, taking advantage of her position standing in front of him, press the unburned side of his face into her bosom. She was back in a high-necked dress after wearing a low-cut gown for her performance as “Lady of Winterfell pleading for her lover’s life,” but she thought that perhaps the dress she wore down to the dungeon had made an impression.

She tugged on his tunic then, indicating he should take it off. She stepped back and leaned on the side table beside her--their?--bed so she could remove her boots. He pulled off his shirt, as she had requested, and she tried not to stare. Or maybe she should stare--maybe that’s _exactly_ what she should do? He yanked off his boots and threw them in the general direction of the door, and she giggled.

He was stripping off his breeches and she was unlacing her gown and dropping it where she stood, letting it pool at her feet, when he finally mentioned the bed. “This for me?” he said, pointing at the vast featherbed mattress laid across the newly built bedframe.

“Yes. I mean, I thought if we were ever going to actually sleep and not just...mate, we could use some extra space,” she said, blushing. The truth was she didn’t always sleep well. The nightmares came unbidden--mostly fractured memories of the Lannisters or the Boltons--but she thought if she was either thrashing or unable to sleep at all, at least _he_ could still get a good night’s rest.

She was removing her shift and then her smallclothes when he turned around to pull back the covers, and when she saw his back, she gasped.

“What?” he barked, startled and concerned at her distress.

His back was covered by a vast blue bruise that extended from the shoulder blade diagonally down to his waist. She was already an expert in the way he looked naked, and she could see that there was also a slight swelling.

“Your back? What...what about the armor?” she asked.

He looked over his shoulder and shrugged. “Some of those fuckers hit hard. The armor keeps them from cutting through easy, but they can still beat the shit out of you. Does it bother you?”

“Not for my sake, you simpleton! It looks painful. Can I do something?” she asked, alarmed.

“Get the fuck in bed, woman, that’s what you can do,” he said. She took a deep breath, irked. _You are impossible. Let me take care of you when I can, you ass._ But then she did as he said.

They just lay there for a minute, appreciating that they were back where they belonged. Appreciating that they had slipped their leashes, for the time being, at least, and were free to do as they pleased. And what pleased her was him.

She had pulled the bedspread up no further than her waist, so he could see her and she could see him. He reached his hand toward one of her pebbled nipples, and brushed it with the back of his hand. Her eyes closed involuntarily and she sank back to give him access to both of her breasts. _I should be pleasuring him_ , she thought, _but this feels so right. I just want to open up every part of myself to him._

Sandor pulled over her, placing one of his arms beside her head, keeping the other hand free. He ran his fingers through her hair and then tipped her mouth up to his. He kissed her once between every word: “You...know...I...hate...gingers.” _What?_

“For years now, whenever I see red hair in a crowd, I lose my mind a little. Is that her? Is she here? And it was never you and you were never there, and I’ve really held it against all the other gingers ever since.” He kissed the indentation behind her earlobe as his huge hand, fingers splayed, trailed down her side, leaving behind a trail of tingling desire. Again, as he had when they had begun touching each other tonight, he touched her nipple and areola with only the back of his hand, and this time she whimpered.

“Little bird,” he whispered into the hollow at the base of throat. “Little bird. You’re mine.” _Yes. Do you want me to say it? Will you touch me more if I say it? Very well._

“Yes, I’m yours,” she said, reaching up to fondly slide her hand under his hair to stroke the back of his neck. “I’m yours. I’m yours, and only yours.”

His head snapped up at that and he looked her in the eye, fierce. _Did you doubt it, my love? It’s been true for so long, much longer than I can begin to explain in any earthly way._

And with that, Sandor silently granted her wish to be touched, pinching her right nipple, while he licked the left nipple. He kissed the shallow between her breasts and used his free hand to push the one on the right into his face. When she felt his scratchy beard brush against her puckered nipple, she shivered and squirmed, and squeezed her legs together.

Desperate to touch him now, she shimmied down the bed, still on her back, so she could reach for his cock. So hot and red and firm, with blue veins running the length of it and that silky skin she loved to hold in her hand. Sansa pulled on his cock and felt him stiffen further. She asked him the first question he had asked her in the cabin: “What do you want? Tell me what you want.”

“This position makes me realize that someday I want to climb on top of you and fuck your mouth while you lie underneath me,” he said. Sansa felt her eyes widen, and the lips of her...cunt swell further with blood and desire. “But not tonight, well, _at least not yet._ Right now I want your fucking legs wrapped around me. It’s been too long since I’ve been between these legs.”

Sandor pulled up on his knees then, and took hold of each of her legs at the ankle. He pulled them up high in the air, so she was half on her back and half in the air. He ran his hands up and down her calves like he was caressing a marble statue in some sept somewhere. And then he pulled her legs apart, as wide as his long arms could reach, and let her legs drop to either side.

Sansa’s initial impulse was to squeak and slam her legs back shut, but she kept them spread as wide as he’d spread them. Sansa thought that he would want that.  
  
She was so incredibly exposed. He was looking down at the place between her legs, as if she were a savory, split-open cockle or oyster, spread for his delectation. No one had ever looked at her down there, certainly not the way he was doing.

With her legs spread wide open before him, he fisted himself in one hand and pumped a couple of times. He used the other hand to drag three fingertips over her cunt. She thought of a conch shell she had once seen in a curiosity shop, and she suspected her woman’s place looked a bit to him like the inside of that shell--pink, glistening, inviting. He pulled on himself harder, while stroking the place between her legs as if he were petting some creature, running his three fingers over and over again in long smooth strokes. She felt sopping wet and closed her eyes in hopes of controlling her desire.

Her hips rolled up toward his hand. She wanted his cock inside her. Fingers? Either. When will he begin? And then she suddenly realized that he would begin right then if she asked him too.

Sansa felt a clutch of fear in her heart. What would happen if she said the words into the air? Her dreams just happened to her. This was reality and truth, and in this world, she had to ask for what she wanted or she might never get it.

“Fuck me. Now. I want you inside me...now,” she said, thinking that next time she ought to try to be pleasant about, but her lust had clouded her face with frustration and she couldn’t quite control it.

Sansa thought she saw Sandor Clegane search his mind for some sort of glib retort, but he couldn’t find one. He was speechless but not purposeless. He dropped back down to hold himself over her, positioned his cockhead at her entrance--so spread open and wet and ready for him--and pushed into her.

Sansa gasped and threw her head back and he took the opportunity to kiss her jawline and neck. She realized he loved taking possession of that part of her, and she thought of how fighting dogs rip their opponents’ throats out.

He heaved himself well above her, bracing himself on extended arms, and pulling his cock out of her almost all the way. Only the tip of him remained inside her and she wanted to chase his cock with her cunt, but then he told her: “Bird--Sansa, look down. I want you to watch us. I want you to see what we are.”

And so he continued thrusting his huge, hard cock in and out of the wet warm place between her widely spread legs, _so_ slowly and deliberately, and they watched together as they joined and parted and joined again and every time he was fully inside her, down to the root, she felt like she would never want for anything again. And when he withdrew, she loved that too, because then she got to watch again and feel the anticipation of his steel driving slowly into her again, and again, and again.

Finally, she could take no more and she snapped her legs around his hips and crossed her ankles over his ass and said, “Didn’t you mention something about legs wrapped around you, _Hound_? Well you’ve got it now, so stop stalling and make me...” She sighed, not sure how to name that feeling of ecstasy and release.

“As you wish,” he said with hooded eyes that told her everything she needed to know about his feelings for her. She wrapped her arms around his neck and kept her legs clasped tightly around him, and he started slamming into her at ever-increasing speed, and just the rhythm and speed and pressure on her nub was extraordinary. Suddenly, she felt her partner in this naked, lovely dance stiffen and shudder and grunt, and she knew he had spent himself inside her.

Sansa inhaled a prideful breath of air. That seed from inside of him was inside her again. _Only her, no other woman._ He was hers. Her sons, if the gods so blessed them, would be his blood. They would have his strength, his heart of fire, and yes, his honor.

“Roll over,” she commanded. He flipped on his back and brought her bodily with him. They were still connected, and so slick. She braced herself on the bed, hands planted above his shoulders and began grinding against his hardness--still-hard cock, hard belly, hard everything. She found a fast, desperate rhythm and with strong hands he pressed her hips down onto him.

She felt close, and began to sing for him, and then gasped and hummed and trilled through her peak of pleasure.

His smile of triumph was plain to see; so was hers, but she was too spent to hold herself up to look at it. She collapsed bodily onto her chest, and he stroked her hair while they both caught their breath.

“Are you happy, girl?” he asked, not in a sneering tone, but in a way that sounded like that it would make _him_ happy to know she was pleased.

She lifted her head long enough to smile her assent. She felt the smile in her eyes as much as in her lips. His mouth twitched back at her.

She settled back down to press her ear to the sound of his great heart still beating strong inside his chest. _Protect him, please. Keep him safe. We need him. I need him, and Arya needs him, and the North needs him. Please._

“Oh!” she said, popping up.

“Yes?” he said, wry as anything.

“We should move the rest of your things up here. I run a frugal estate, Clegane, and I can’t afford to squander any available rooms. Wait, that’s presumptuous. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. I mean, you don’t have to sleep here all the time, if you don’t want, but...” she said.

He shrugged, still lazy in the afterglow. “I want,” said Sandor.

“Oh!” said Sansa, pleased.

“But I don’t have anything other than what you just stripped off me, so it won’t be much work,” he chuckled.

_Oh, you dear, penniless lunatic._

“Well, good then. I have plenty to do as it is,” said Sansa. “I should get up and check with the steward about the meal plan for next week, but I like it better here.”

“Eh, I’m hungry,” said Sandor, nudging her off him with a thrust of his hips and then rolling out of bed.

“You’re always hungry,” she laughed.

“I’m a growing boy,” he insisted, heading over to the chamber pot to relieve himself. She liked to watch him hold his cock in his hand, even if just to piss.

He was lacing his breeches back on when there was a knock at the door. Sandor’s eyes instantly narrowed, and in her corner, Willow starting barking and pulled up on her haunches.

Sansa tried very hard not to roll her eyes, and then thought that was why they were the guard dogs. It was their nature to protect their people from strangers. Some of those strangers were friends, some might be foe, but above all they were not _friend_ , not in the inner circle.

She found her pale blue cable-knit wool robe in the wardrobe and pulled it around her tightly, tying the belt firmly. She was still sopping wet between her legs, his seed dripping down her thighs in a sloppy mess.

Willow got up and ran to stand beside the door before she could even get there, and Sandor gestured to wait, while he pulled on his tunic and picked up the long blade that stayed front and center on his sword belt. It was his favored weapon if he was not fighting many soldiers at one time in an outright battle.

“Who is it?” she answered.

“Maester Wolkan, my lady,” came the reply. She made a “told you” face at Sandor and gestured for him to hold onto Willow. She opened the door and braced herself for Wolkan’s look of disapproval at the sight of the Lady of Winterfell in company of not one but two hounds.

Instead, she saw Maester Wolkan stand up a little straighter at the sight of them together, and maybe the ghost of a smile passed over his lips.

“My lady, I apologize for bothering you with this but the King and Queen are currently indisposed--” he said.

“What, and _she’s_ not indisposed? Look at her,” snarked Sandor, gesturing with his blade at her state of partial undress from his place next to the door.

“A family of ice giants has arrived and they don’t speak the Common Tongue very well. They just keep staying ‘Snow. Snow.’ over and over. Missandei is with them now, trying to learn their language. But I wondered what you want me to do with them until morning, when perhaps His Grace will receive them?” said Wolkan.

“I’ll come welcome them to Winterfell myself. We wouldn’t be standing here if it weren’t for Wun Wun...I thought all the ice giants were gone,” said Sansa, musing. Even as she said it, she regretted that she would have to leave their nest, if only for a little while.

“Oh, and a raven came for you from Lady Waynwood at Ironoaks in the Vale,” said Wolkan, handing her the scroll, bowing briefly at her and Sandor Clegane, and then departing.

_It is with sadness that I must report the death of your cousin Robin Arryn. His last will and testament names you as his heir, and thus Lady of the Eyrie and Protector of the Vale. I have sent a similar message to Lord Royce. I trust you will work together in service of the Knights of the Vale and the future of our Kingdom. Lady Anya of House Waynwood, Ironoaks_

She realized that what she was feeling was faint. Her vision wasn’t straight anymore and she wasn’t sure which way was supposed to be forward.

Breathing. How do you do that?

She reeled and wasn’t sure which piece of furniture would be best to clutch--

And then Sandor, her Hound, was there, holding her up. He had his arms around her and she was so grateful and so sad at the same time. She felt ashamed, and she wanted to cry, and she felt guilty for clinging to him even as it felt like she had betrayed him and herself, in some way.

There wasn’t a sound to be heard in the room except for the crackle in the fireplace. Sansa gave in to the perfect feeling of him holding her. His arms were as heavy as anything, and the weight of him, the steel of him, seemed to infuse itself into her bones by his touch alone. She remembered how to breathe again, although she didn’t dare touch him as she wanted. Her arms hung limply by her side. How could she hang on to him? She had sent him away from her and they had both wandered in the wilderness for so long. She knew that punishing herself was fruitless, wasteful, childish, and yet she felt desperate for some further suffering to pay for what she had done.

“I did what I had to do to survive,” she mumbled into his chest. “I let him kiss me, and I promised to _reward_ him if he brought the Knights of the Vale to the Battle of the Bastards.”

“And...?” said Sandor, pulling back to look down at her. “What’s that fucking raven scroll say anyway?”

She handed it to him to read and then sat on the edge of the unmade bed. “It’s a gift...from Littlefinger. The Eyrie is mine. He wanted to marry me and run me as his puppet. If he could get rid of Jon, he’d have the North and the Vale. He once told me it was his dream to sit on the Iron Throne with me by his side.”

Sandor laughed then, and threw the scroll on the flagstone floor, and he laughed some more, and it was genuine mirth. He looked at her and smiled at her fondly, the laugh still in the back of his throat. “That stupid greedy fucker. What? You feel guilty because you used him for what _you_ wanted, which was to get the fuck out of King’s Landing and back North? Spare me. You beat that shit at his own game. Take the Eyrie and piss on his name.”

He grabbed her face then, and tipped her chin up to look at him. “Girl,” he said, “A mockingbird is a false bird. It steals songs from other birds, doesn’t have one if its own. He stole from _you_ and don’t you ever doubt it, not for one second.”

That strangely felt like, absolution, maybe, but understanding, certainly--empathy.

She had survived without Sandor Clegane, somehow, but it was mere survival. Now she was alive. She was a Stark in Winterfell with her Hound, and this was their den, and nothing else would ever come close to feeling as right as this.

She felt like she had a thousand different feelings on her face at once. He watched her, still on edge, so she stood back up then and threw herself back into his arms, and she felt him kiss the top of her head.

“I have to see to the ice giants,” she said, looking up at him.

“Of course you do,” said Sandor Clegane, here with her in the Lord’s Chamber at Winterfell. She wondered if the novelty of it would _ever_ wear off.

He leaned down to kiss her, a sweet simple kiss on the lips, and she felt the burst of her own smile. He reached further down her back to grab her bum and squeeze, and then he shoved her gently toward the wardrobe.

* * * * *

_I want to be back with him._

_If he’s asleep, I’ll work on the patterning and the cuts for the gloves. He’ll have to be sleeping on his belly with that terrible bruise on his back._

_If he’s awake, I wonder if he’ll allow me to massage that stiff leg--and other stiff things._

Re-entering Winterfell through the North Gate and making her way through the godswood, Sansa held her skirts out of the snow in one hand, and held a torch aloft in the other hand, and wore tiny smile of satisfaction on her face.

Whatever trouble Sansa Stark and Sandor Clegane had with protocol and politics and war and the outside world, they had no such challenges in bed. In bed, when it was just the two of them, everything made perfect sense. They understood each other. As she’d thought of how he told her that Lord Baelish was a false bird, a bird who only stole songs, she called what they had together _empathy_. Maybe it was the dream bond they’d shared for so long now, or maybe they were always two of a kind, always perfectly suited, two halves of something.

She understood so much about him and what didn’t make sense to her, she loved anyway. Sometimes she thought his flaws were more precious to her than his features. He was cantankerous and temperamental. He was oddly sensitive, when it came to her, and moody. He had scars, and a filthy mouth, and he was just too big for everything, even here in the North where there was nothing but space. Left to his own devices--and he never would be again, not as long as she had breath in her body--he would live in a wine cask, wear nothing but rags, sharpen his sword and be so terribly alone.

_I want to be back with him._

“What did you do to the Hound?” said the familiar voice behind her.

“Hello, dear sister,” said Sansa.

“Hello, Lady Stark,” said Arya. “What did you do to the Hound?”

“Nothing! I mean, wait...What are you asking exactly?” said Sansa, not sure if Arya wanted to hear the real answer to her question. She didn’t the Hound would care one bit if she talked to Arya about what they did behind closed doors, but was that what Arya was really asking?

“This whole thing. Why did he fall for you anyway? You’re a pretty idiot--” said Arya.

“I’m not idiot! I’m a slow learner, it’s true, but I’m not totally hopeless. Arya, aren’t we supposed to be-- _ugh_!” grunted Sansa, frustrated.

She stopped walking then, and Arya did too, and they were almost alone together in the quiet of the godswood, surrounded by their trees and the ghosts of their ancestors and a few scattered guards at the margins.

“You’re a pretty idiot. You have learned a lot, and you’ve turned out not half-bad at running Winterfell and those cocksucker Northern lords, but I knew you when he first met you, and you were just beyond useless. What did you do to him to make him even notice you? I can’t think of two people I could name who are less alike than you and him,” concluded Arya.

_Well, that was true._

“I think we balance each other a bit. I think we see things in each other that we admire that we don’t know how to create in ourselves. And truthfully, we’ve just been driven to...mate...in a rather explicit and carnal way for many years,” said Sansa.

Arya made a face.

Sansa continued: “He thinks I’m a witch. Bran says I skinchanged him. I truly have no idea what I did or how it must have felt for him. Sandor...he says it doesn’t hurt, so that’s a mercy at least.”

“Sandor?!” said Arya, making a different face, this time shocked at the use of the Hound’s given name.

“I need him, and he needs me, and I think the Old Gods ordained that we find each other, and...here we are,” said Sansa.

_I wish I could explain it better. I wish I dared to say that magic or no, it was simply love. We fell in love because it couldn’t be helped. It was simply necessary and true, almost from the beginning. He fell first because he was already a person and he knew what we could be, and then somehow, even though we were leagues apart, as I grew up, and I grew strong, and I fell in love with the scraps of him, with the ghost of him, that was my memory of our time together in King’s Landing._

“Do you know what you’re doing? Really? Because today I heard a lot of _bitch_ and _she-wolf in heat_ ,” warned Arya.

 _She-wolf in heat? They’re not wrong. It was time to claim my partner, and to let him claim me, and to make a pair out of the two of us._ _Any other choice was death, fast or slow. We had to. We have to. For the future. For our own sakes_. _We_ had _to._

“I have _no_ idea what I’m doing, but this is the only way. The _only_ way, Arya,” said Sansa, feeling suddenly desperate to explain herself to her little sister. Not because she owned Arya an explanation but because she really wanted her to understand them.

“Do you love him?” asked Arya, a threat in her eyes.

Sansa smiled and with her free hand reached out to Arya: “With all my heart. We’ll protect him, won’t we? You and I?”

Arya exhaled out of her nose--Sansa watched the breath turn into coils of steam--and squeezed her sister back.

“Yes, we’ll protect him. He loves you too, you know. Always has. Might not ever tell you, but he does,” said Arya, with great intent and sincerity, as if she were saying vows herself.

“I know. I don’t need his words. I have his actions. Acts over words, I think, is his nature,” said Sansa, smiling.

She turned toward the Great Keep then, and arm-in-arm, the two sisters made their way home together.

* * * * *

She slowly eased open the door to the Lord’s Chamber. _Must oil the door hinges. I’ve never needed to think about waking someone before._

She was greeted by a faint bark from the direction of Willow’s corner, and the sound of the bed shifting under Sandor’s weight. The fire in the hearth was down to embers, giving the room a faint glow of orange but the air in the room was chill and crisp. She saw that the one of the shutters was slightly ajar and was crossing the room to close it when she heard the first whimper.

The deepest of voices, sleepy and gruff, muttered into a pillow: “Your puppies are here.”

She gasped. _The puppies!_

“Leave them be, bird. I checked them and they’re all fine. She’s a good mother. Put another log on the fire, little bird, and get the fuck in bed. It’s cold,” said Sandor, before crashing his face back into the pillow. He was sleeping on his belly, just as she had imagined, because of the pain from the mottled blue bruises on his back. Tomorrow she’d heat stones and wrap them in cloth and use them to settle his pain a little.

Tonight, she did as she was told, putting in another piece of wood to feed the fire, removing her cloak and hanging it up. She pulled off her boots, and found his where he’d thrown them behind the door and lined them up together _one two three four_.

She unlaced her gown and put it away in the wardrobe, and pulled down her hair. She found her hairbrush and pulled it through her hair over and over again, until he lifted his head up again and growled in her general direction. She suppressed a giggle.

_He makes me laugh more in a day than I think I’ve laughed in whole years since Father died._

She _was_ a little bit chilly, although the warmth between her legs was already growing at the mere idea of him.

“Bird!” he said from the bed, up on his elbows now.

She thought of removing her shift and her smallclothes, but decided not to make it too easy for him--for them.

Whereas air in the room had an air of frost to it, the bed seemed hot as an oven, an oven fueled by his body. The furs she pulled up around her must contribute some of that feeling of heat, but she knew it was mostly his power that warmed her.

The new bed was delightful large, a play space for them both, so she thought to lie quietly on her side, closer to the fire, and see what became of her. He was lying on one arm now and watching her.

“Oh, how many?” she blurted out.

“How many _what_?” he rumbled.

“How many puppies?” she asked. “I don’t want to touch them too much--”

“--because they’ll get sick eyes. There’s six. Even the one that got the hind teat looks good,” said Sandor. “You’re wearing a lot of clothes, bird.”

“Not so many. I mean, more than you, but not so many,” she teased.

“Come here,” he demanded.

“No, you come here,” she said, reaching out for him. She wasn’t sure she was cut out for seduction. So slow.

Sandor reached his hand out to meet hers. Their fingers intertwined in the middle of the bed for a few minutes.

“How are your ice giants?” he asked.

“They are well, thank you for asking. Fifteen of them, more than I ever imagined could have survived. I put them out past the Dothraki,” said Sansa, remembering the horrible image of Wun Wun’s great strong body brought down by that one arrow.

_Anything could take any one of us at any time. An arrow could kill Sandor Clegane just as easy as it killed Wun Wun._

“And your birdhouse?” asked Sandor, stroking the palm of her hand with his great callused thumb.

“My birdho--oh, the Eyrie. I met with Tyrion Lannister and Lord Royce about it. Tyrion will tell Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen in the morning that they have conquered another one of the kingdoms bloodlessly,” she said, picturing the snow castle she’d built in the yard there. It had been destroyed like this one might be soon enough.

“How’s your back?” she asked, looking him right in the eye through the dusky shadows. _Tell me the truth._

“It hurts, but not remarkably much. It’ll turn yellow instead of blue in a couple of days and then you can stop worrying, little bird,” he said, his eyes warm.

_No one has looked after you for years and years and years. Poor dear Hound._

“I’m going to make you a hot compress in the morning, if that dead dragon doesn’t come back or the Night King doesn’t try anything,” she said. She still wanted to get him down to the hot springs as well. “There’s so much I want to do for you,” she confessed. _It would be my honor to serve you, Sandor Clegane. I hope you believe that you’re worth it._

“There’s so much I want to do _to_ you,” he said, pushing back the furs, then. He smiled the particular predatory smile he saved for when he had plans for her cunt, and scooted toward her in the bed. She met him in the middle of the bed. Their bed.

She pulled up on her elbows to meet him--she wanted to kiss him--but he nudged her back down with an index finger pushed gently into her shoulder. She settled into place and watched him look her up and down.

That same finger touched her bottom lip and pulled it down so that her lips parted. Her tongue darted out to lick her lips. _Kiss me_.

He did not. His fingertip traced down to her chin and down her neck to her collarbone, where he traced each bone over to her shoulder and back. Her skin chilled with radiating goosebumps and somehow, her nipples tightened even further under her shift. She thought she saw his eyes briefly flick down to her breasts before returning to her face. Sandor then traced the neckline of her shift and tried to tug in down below her breasts, and when it wouldn’t give, he simply kissed each of her nipples through the fabric and she arched into him.

 _Fine, fine, you win._ She untied the laces that bound her torso into the shift, and he smiled in approval and slid his whole warm hand inside, brushing over her nipples and all but bypassing them to stroke down her sides and she arched yet again.

He was already hard, that thick red steel jumping and twitching for _her_. She wanted to make him harder, but when she pulled up to reach for him he nudged her down again.

“Take this off,” he said, pulling on her shift at the waist, and then running his hand down the outside of her leg and returning between her legs. She lifted up her behind and wiggled the shift up and over her head. She tossed it toward the headboard in hopes that she could find it later if she needed it.

He pushed her knees apart and was running his hands, his huge warm hands, up and down her inner thighs, coming so close to her smallclothes and her weeping cunt beneath them, but never touching. She felt...desperate. She wanted his kisses, she wanted him to touch her breasts and suck on her nipples.

She wanted his fingers inside her and his thick cock pumping into her, and his impossible, incredible body looming over her and pressing her back into the feather mattress.

“Sandor, please,” she begged. _Mercy_.

He looked her up and down, appraisingly, from the eyes to her cunt and back again, and leaned over her, propping himself up on his left arm. Sandor Clegane looked into her eyes and said, “Sansa Stark, you are a gift from the gods that I don’t deserve. You are magical, but not just because you’re a witch. You’re magical because you are good and kind and warm and so much better to everyone than they deserve. Including me. Especially me.” Then he slipped two fingers of his right hand under her smallclothes and right into her cunt. She moaned at the penetration and pushed against it. He kissed her then, deep, savage, hard kisses. She could feel that he was trying to use his mouth to show her the depth of his feeling for her. _I know, my love, I know._

She grabbed him around the neck and clutched him to her, and somehow the kisses deepened, tongues and soft lips, and sharp nibbling teeth, everything tender and fierce at the same time. He pulled his fingers out of her then, and tried to claw off her smallclothes. She helped.

Once that barrier was out of the way, he pulled back from her mouth, grabbed both her buttocks and lifted her hips off the bed, toward him. He squeezed and massaged her bum and she was so ready for him so could feel her wetness slipping out of her and down to her asshole.

“Sandor, please, now,” she begged again. _Mercy._

He smiled at her, that smug sexual smile of his that was half predatory and half charm, and then leaned over her and the tip of his cock finally found her entrance. She keened against him, and he slid into her as smoothly as a sword finds its sheath.

She gasped. The size of his cock was still as shocking as it had been that first time in the cabin. It strained her entrance and when he was in her to the hilt, she felt as if she might break in half. He pulled out to the tip and plunged back in her, and she felt almost faint at the sensations he elicited. Her body was consumed by their fire, and her soul felt like it was at peace only in those moments when he fitted inside her so fully.

As their pace quickened, she heard the sounds of their bodies, cock and cunt and belly and breast, slapping against each other, and then she heard her name on his lips. “Sansa,” he muttered. “Sansa...Sansa...Sansa,” he said, whispering it every time he thrust into her, and she rejoiced. In the few days they had been together, she had noticed that he surrendered to her name only when he was surrendered, body and soul, to her in their marriage bed. Their lovemaking opened him up so that he dared to leave behind _girl_ and _woman_ and _little bird_ and _Stark_ and say her true name, the name she knew he kept locked so deep in his heart that it hardly ever saw the sun.

She spoke back into his bad ear, petting his scars and his beard as she did. “I hear you, my Hound, my love. I hear you,” she said, and he wrapped his arms around her, crushing her to his chest even as she was already crushed between him and then bed, and she wrapped her legs tighter around his waist, and suddenly the angle changed and her pleasure exploded beginning at her nub and spreading through the rest of her in waves.

She dug her claws deep into his back to keep from falling right off of the world on the sensations that swept over her.

 _Mine_.

He increased his own pace and after a handful of thrusts, she heard that deep rolling groan, that grunt, that meant that he had found his release. She tightened her walls around him, even as she had done involuntarily during her own release, milking his seed from his cock and allowing him to embed himself ever deeper inside her.

As he caught his breath and recovered himself above her, she grazed her lips over his scarred side, over and over again.

 _Mine. Mine. Mine. You are mine, my love. And I am yours. One heart, one soul, one flesh_.

********

That night she dreamed that she was being chased and she couldn’t get away and she just kept running and running and was never either caught nor free.

She dreamed of a hearty feast her parents had thrown for Lord Bronze Royce and Waymar Royce when they’d come North on their way to the Wall.

And she dreamed of Willow’s six puppies, only they weren’t puppies, they were six little dark-haired boys with gray eyes. The six were playing chase and tackle in the godswood and gently biting one another on the ears and back of the neck while they leapt and crawled over one another in a wild, joyful dogpile.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And...scene.
> 
> You will _not_ be surprised to learn that the seed is strong. 
> 
> I have a couple of ideas for other pieces in this series but if there's anything else you'd like to know about this AU, your comments and suggestions are very welcome.
> 
> {{Mwah! kisses to you all}}


End file.
